Column formatted code for clarity

There is a power in giving more clarity to code by taking advantage of the human eye’s desire to seek patterns. Compare this code:

void APPcreateNonblockingPipe(int Pipe[2]){
   BAS_FUNCTION(APPcreateNonblockingPipe);
   if (-1 == pipe(Pipe))                          { BASerrorMessage(errno); }
   if (-1 == fcntl(Pipe[0], F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK)) { BASerrorMessage(errno); }
   if (-1 == fcntl(Pipe[1], F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK)) { BASerrorMessage(errno); }

To this code:

void APPcreateNonblockingPipe(int Pipe[2]){
   BAS_FUNCTION(APPcreateNonblockingPipe);
   int Result = pipe(Pipe);
   if (Result == -1){
      BASerrorMessage(errno); 
   }    
   Result = fcntl(Pipe[0], F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK);
   if (Result == -1){
      BASerrorMessage(errno); 
   }    
   Result = fcntl(Pipe[1], F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK)) 
   if (Result == -1){
      BASerrorMessage(errno); 
   }    
}

The former form is easier to comprehend what we are doing because we can visually see we are doing the same operation to the parts of the pipe.

The code creates a pipe and makes both the read and write end nonblocking.

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