From: "John Chambers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 2:49 AM Subject: Re: [abcusers] Re: continuations
> Phil Taylor writes: > | John Chambers wrote: > | >(And we'll still have the even more minor problem caused by > | >the fact that some programmers will replace the '\' with a > | >space, while others will delete it plus the newline, > | >causing the two lines to be joined without a separator. > | >This is a problem that still plagues several programming > | >languages. It's made worse by the fact that there's no > | >logical solution; both ways work equally well. Quandaries > | >like this are almost impossible for a group of humans to > | >ever solve. ;-) > | > | Er, why would you want to put a space in place of the backslash? > | Joining the two lines without a separator seems the logical > | thing to do (or at least I can't immediately think of a situation > | where adding a space would make sense). > > Well, I tend to agree. But I think the contrary argument is that a > lot of people are surprised when the two lines are joined without a > space. They then have to go back and fix it (e.g. by putting a space > before the '\'). I think the idea is that this "Oops!" reaction > wastes more time than the alternative. > > But note that I called this an "even more minor problem". We're > really on the fringe here, and it's probably not worth wasting much > time on. I'd also vote for making a final '\' delete both itself and > the newline, and join the next line without adding anything. You can > always put a space before the '\'. agreed; is as straightforward as possible. > Another fringe case is what happens when a line ends with '\', a > space, and a newline. It's common for many implementations to not > recognize this as a continuation. This one is really baffling to a > user, who usually can't see the space. The right way to handle this > is to strip off the trailing spaces (and tabs), and then check for > the final '\'. The input routine is now not quite as trivial (though > it's still pretty trivial). is not so straightforward Arent To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
