On Dec 3, 3:06 pm, levand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am coming to Clojure from the Java side, and am completely ignorant
> about lisp indentation & newline conventions.
>
> Some things are easy to pick up from posted examples and common
> sense...newline + tab after the parameters vector when defining a
> function, etc.
>
> But I did some web searches on lisp & emacs conventions, and some
> things aren't so clear. For example, this googled web page (http://
> dept-info.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~strandh/Teaching/MTP/Common/Strandh-
> Tutorial/indentation.html) indicates that in the "if" special form,
> each sub-expression should be aligned. Is this accomplished by tabs +
> spaces until they align? What if the editor isn't using a fixed-width
> font (or is it assumed that it always is?) Or is that the emacs editor
> aligning things irrespective of what whitespace characters are really
> there?
>
> Which leads to the other immortal question - tab characters, or [n]
> consecutive spaces? I'm fairly ambivalent myself and can go either
> way, but is there a clear preferred way in the clojure community that
> I would be better served by adhering to?
>
> Does anyone know of a reference for, or would care to enumerate what
> standard clojure indenting ought to be?
>
> I'm particularly interested in this as I've been hacking about with a
> clojure eclipse plugin for my own use and am considering adding auto-
> indent features.
After twenty years as a working lisp programmer, the rule of thumb I
use for readable lisp indentation style is, imagine the parentheses
are invisible; now use indentation to convey the grouping of
expressions and subexpressions. In general, indent parallel expression
to the same level; indent subsidiary expressions to a deeper level.
Break those rules when it will make the code clearer and more
readable.
let foo bar
baz grault
some-hairy-expression-containing-foo-and-baz
let foo bar
baz some-function
some-subexpression-containing-hairy-code
some-other-expression
some-subexpression-of-the-previous-line
another-parallel-subexpression
something-that-comes-after-the-previous-expression
Use spaces. Tabs are evil, because every editor does something
different with them, and indentation is meaningful.
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