As long as team members disagree on style, reformatters cannot answer the style question. It would result in a continuous war of style rewrites, resulting in checkins affecting virtually every line. I personally think formatters can never answer the style question, because software development is a visual art, like painting, in addition to everything else that it is. I write my programs in a certain style because I want them to look a certain way. My code expresses my personal creativity. It's a very personal thing. Reformatting my program is as aesthetically displeasing as painting a few new angels on the sistine chapel. Agreeing to a common set of style choices provides a framework that lets each member satisfy their need for visual-artistic control, while avoiding the artistic insult of reformatting. Team members may still disagree on aesthetic details, but the common rules give them space within which to work, just as a poetic style or musical genre does. Attempts have been made to develop programming lanugages with a canonical indentation style to reduce variation (e.g. comb style in Ada), and there have been programming languages that stored and rerendered your code in a cononical form (e.g. old microsoft BASIC). These efforts are successful at reducing variation, but there is still a lot of wiggle-room for individual style. Anyone remember the trick of beginning a line of BASIC with ':' to keep the parser from removing spaces and letting you express indentation? How about indents, paragraph style, and header rows of '******' or '=====' in comments? Style wars may also express ego in team situations. They may be used as a distraction from work. They may occur for reasons that have nothing to do with the code. Give it up. You'll never get rid of style wars.
