On May 29, 2002 01:48 pm, Geoff Thorpe wrote:
Hi there,
First, if you reply to this please just send it to the list - I don't need personal copies of every email on this thread - what kind of foolishness is it where everyone hits "reply to all" on list mail??? A little netiquette please ...
This is how things are setup on wine-* lists. If you hit "Reply", it just goes to you, not the list. Anyway, I'll edit the header for you from now on.
broken lines rather than indentation levels. If you use expression alignment, then you are from the same school of thought that bastardisation of HTML is legitimate because GUI-rendering of HTML is the paramount consideration. There are other schools of thought that state
No, it's the other way around. You use expression alignment because it's easier on the eye, not the automatic tool. Indentation and alignment is essential because it conveys structure. Brackets, for that matter, are rather useless -- if the code is not properly indented and formatted, noone will parse the brackets to figure out the structure.
that source code, like HTML, exists to logically describe context and mechanics. Logic before aesthetic. Etc. If you want to do ASCII art, source code is probably not the place.
We're not talking about ASCII art here, we're talking about an aesthetic source base. If that's not important to you, we really have nothing to talk about.
A tab's role historically was to represent a level of indentation. Quoted
Indeed. And when you print you code, how much will the printer indent a tab? Anyway, it seems we talk for the fun of it (?), but let me summarize my ideas: -- if you can avoid mixing tabs and space, all power to you It is nice, generates better diffs -- I don't believe it pays to enforce *no* spaces at the beginning of the line. It's nice, I like it too, but sometimes I do use spaces. -- I think it's *much* simpler and has a bigger payoff if we nicely recommend people use 4 space indentation, however they choose.
To conclude, I think source is like a picture. It is visual. You should look at it like at a nice drawing. You will notice that in general, the tools used to create drawings are more about that "how" rather than about the "what" to do. In other words, they don't give you much abstraction. I am a firm believer in separating content from presentation. But I'm not at all convinced that using the very thin abstraction of \t is worth getting religious about. Paper thin abstractions don't work. That's why people don't use HTML to convey content but have moved to XML, leaving HTML to worry about the presentation.