As someone who almost exclusively uses grep for finding what I need in codebases that are new to me and old to me, you can make whatever arbitrary rules you want, as long as you're consistent, I'll be pretty happy with it. If syntax is loose in some area (single vs double quotes, parens or braces or none), just do the same thing every time. Whitespace consistency isn't crucial, but it can't hurt (between function name and parens, for example).