Brad Rembielak said: Speaking of Egyption Brackets, I recently wanted to post a SO question (but don't have the nerve) asking why people still use Egyption Brackets because I thought that style died out years and years ago especially after Code Complete. Actually Code Complete advocates the Egyptian style as I recall, which is one reason I started using it when writing C/C++ code. The reasoning is it makes blocks easier to distinguish if their shapes are like this: MMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMM M As opposed to this: MMMMMMMMMMM M MMMMMMM M And frankly it better matches many other languages like Ruby, Python and JavaScript. In fact it seems most JavaScript these days is written that way. So while the name is perfectly fine, to act like this style is bad or out-of-date just shows one as being an unexperienced programmer.