Taming Dangerously Deep Nesting
Excessive indentation, or "nesting," has been pilloried in computing literature for 25 years and is still one of the chief culprits in confusing code. Studies by Noam Chomsky and Gerald Weinberg suggest that few people can understand more than three levels of nested ifs (Yourdon 1986a), and many researchers recommend avoiding nesting to more than three or four levels (Myers 1976, Marca 1981, and Ledgard and Tauer 1987a). Deep nesting works against what Chapter 5, describes as Software's Primary Technical Imperative: Managing Complexity. That is reason enough to avoid deep nesting.
It's not hard to avoid deep nesting. ...
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