Jon,
I think many of the questions relating to your layout query are
covered by sentence 763 at:
www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/cbook.html
You might also like to look at Section 9.1 "C culture and
developer knowledge" of sentence 1. This covers categorization
issues and implicit learning that I think is relevant to your queries.
>In the programming language Haskell, layout (indentation) is
>used as an alternative to begin/end (actually {/})
>bracketing and semicolons.
Occam is the only other language I know that has this property.
I suspect it derives more from mathematicians delight in minimalism
than good language design practice.
>do thing1
> thing2-p1
> <op> thing2-p2
>
>comes out as do {thing1; thing2-p1} <op> thing2-p2
>
>and I think that's really bad, because "from a visual
>perspective '<op> thing2-p2' is perceived as being at the
>same 'level' as thing1 and thing2-p1"
After trawling what studies I could find, the conclusion I
came to was that issues such as this were driven by higher level
cognitive processes (which require effort), not the lower automatic
ones (which don't appear to be effortless).
My other conclusion was that what developers considered to
be 'natural' were those constructs they had lots of experience with.
I would claim that your preferences are derived from what you have
learnt from reading Haskell (and other languages) source code.
>It's this quoted statement for which I need some sort of
>theoretical support.
I think you are simply a creature of your past experiences.
I think there will be sufficient creatures, having different past experiences,
who take the opposite view, that there is nothing to be gained
from choosing one way or the other.
The paper by Quinlan discussed in sentence 763 (see figure 6) found
a 50/50 split of the population, in how items were grouped.
derek
--
Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk
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