Editing Indentation style (section)

== Overview ==

This article primarily addresses styles for [[free-form language|free-form]] [[programming language]]s. As the name implies, such language code need not follow an indentation style. Indentation is a [[secondary notation]] that is often intended to lower [[cognitive load]] for a programmer to understand the structure of the code. 
Indentation can clarify the separation between the code executed based on [[control flow]].

Structured languages, such as [[Python (programming language)|Python]] and [[occam (programming language)|occam]],  use indentation to determine the structure instead of using braces or keywords; this is termed the [[off-side rule]]. In such languages, indentation is meaningful to the language processor (such as [[compiler]] or [[Interpreter (computing)|interpreter]]). A programmer must conform to the language's indentation rules although may be free to choose indentation size.

This article focuses on [[curly-bracket languages]] (that delimit blocks with [[curly bracket|curly brackets, a.k.a. curly braces, a.k.a. braces]]) and in particular 
[[List of C-family programming languages|C-family languages]], but a convention used for one language can be adapted to another language. For example, a language that uses <code>BEGIN</code> and <code>END</code> keywords instead of braces can be adapted by treating <code>BEGIN</code> the same as the open brace and so on.

Indentation style only applies to text-based languages. [[Visual programming language]]s have no indentation.