On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:55 AM, Daniel Lyons <fus...@storytotell.org>wrote:
> > On Aug 13, 2009, at 3:14 AM, Aaron W. Hsu wrote: > > So, I was browsing around the other day looking at Acme resources, and I >> discovered an old post from 1995 wherein someone advocated the use of >> proportional fonts for programming in Acme. This surprised me, to say the >> least. He even went as far as to mention that SML was the language they were >> using, and had managed to get a decent indenting pattern for it that was >> just as readable, without messing things up for proportional font users. >> >> I have to admit that I'm a bit skeptical about whether such a technique >> actually works, and so, I thought I would pose some questions to you. >> > > Bjarne Stroustrup actually advocates this style in "The C++ Programming > Language." > > This discussion reminds me of this elastic tab stops concept: > > http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/ > > I don't think it made it into any editors, but it would support the kind of > fancy alignment I like to have in my code while also supporting real fonts, > which I would prefer to use. > > Thirdly, would you continue using proportional width fonts in cases like >> Lisp code, where you very often see something like the following indentation >> scheme, and how would you resolve these indentation problems with >> proportional width fonts if you did continue to use them? >> >> (let ([foo bar] >> [something else]) >> (some-func (called again) >> (with fun indentation) >> (and yet) >> (another))) >> > > > I bet you could set up Emacs to use a proportional font. It can do > anything, right? :) > > I'd love it if Acme or Plan 9 had good support for some kind of Lisp > variant. Acme has good enough support for Lisp in that I can edit the program buffer, and then re-load it all in Acme via the "win" program. I use it with SBCL this way on my mac actually. Emacs + SLIME is pretty nice, but sometimes quite a bit more than I need. > > > — > Daniel Lyons > > >
