>In xBASE, one of the thing that always annoyed me was code written by folks who insisted that truncating keywords to shortest-possible form and removing all indentation made their code "look professional" (I guess it was their interpretation that since only an "expert" could make heads-or-tails of the code, their code was "expert"-level code). Yes, it wouldn't make much difference once compiled into p-code format, it does make a huge difference in readability of the code -- but that point was often lost on those folks.

I used to abbreviate code a lot, and still do in command window - but not in code. Besides, ever since we got intellisense, it doesn't matter. But it did matter a lot in the times of 80x24 screens, where your code window's margins would take some of that away. The definition of "fits the screen" applied even then, but the screen was smaller.

Indentation, however... looking through my code from the times before I heard of indentation, ouch... fugly and unreadable. As soon as I heard of it, whenever I had to touch a piece of old code, I'd go through it and indent it properly and only then start looking at what I needed to do to it. Within a couple of months it was all neat.