I find the latter easier to read, but from experience I know it's harder to maintain, for the reasons Craig and Dorris have already outlined. I "view" it as being pretty, but fragile.

I believe questions like this should be moot - the IDE should be configurable to show you the code the way you want to see it. It should have 2 modes: "real" mode, which shows you exactly what's in the source file, and "pretty" mode, which would make it more readable according to your personal preferences. Ideally modes could be switched quickly with a hot key etc.

The idea would be similar to applying different CSSs to a Web page.

Now that the VFP language is "stable" something like this could conceivably be built :)

For comparison, my impression is the VS IDE is fairly rigid in its conventions for indentation and whitespace, from the very limited amount I've used it and seen it demo'd. Maybe I just never bothered to look for any customizations. Overall its code editor's better than VFP's, however.

I attended the HHH launch event today here in Vancouver and the code editing demos (in VS 2008) still looked pretty rigid in formatting. It would seem that MS's preference is for less flexibility and personalization, rather than more.