> This sort of claim needs to be justified by evidence. We had it the first way
> until the late 1990s. I changed it to the other way while working on large
> proof states connected with crypto protocols. It seemed more readable to me
> for such proofs.
I was taught at school to avoid starting every sentence with "I think" or "I
believe", since obviously whatever I say is my opinion, but since this
apparently leads to confusion, I'll happily relativize my previous statement:
Just as you found one style more readable than another (without giving any
evidence), *I* find
foo ==>
bar
and especially
foo ==> bar ==>
baz
much more readable than the alternative, because they yield less opportunities
for what Bryan Garner (Modern Am. E. Usage) refers to as "miscues" when
parsing. When I read the alternative, I get the same effect as when I listen to
the Murder City Devils and they sing
God knows she's pretty
messed up
I don't think there's a need for a big empirical study to observe the miscue;
it should be easily reproducible by any left-to-right reader. By the same
token, I can understand that in the presence of [| ... |], the opposite
convention has its benefits (as stressed by Andreas).
One more case: Suppose you have
foo ==>
bar ==> baz
Notice how the break falls naturally where you would insert the parentheses:
foo ==>
(bar ==> baz)
Compare with
foo ==> (bar
==> baz)
So I will be apologized, surely, for preferring the end-of-line treatment for
operators that bind to the right, while realizing that I might be in the
minority on this mailing list.
Jasmin
_______________________________________________
isabelle-dev mailing list
isabelle-...@in.tum.de
https://mailmanbroy.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/mailman/listinfo/isabelle-dev
