begin quoting Christopher Smith as of Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 02:25:17PM -0800: > SJS wrote: > > Except that it *doesn't* improve readability. > > > > The eye *believes* whitespace, but it's also not very good at it. It's > > okay at determining that yeah, verily, there *is* whitespace, but it's > > not very good at determining how much. For very small programs, that's > > okay; but these languages are no longer being used solely for small > > programs. > > > If you honestly believed that, you shouldn't indent your code. In fact,
Um, no. Don't be stupid. The point is that indentation is a _hint_, and not _definitive_. Indentation is documentation, not syntax. > as an experiment, I encourage you to compare your code before and after > such a transformation. I assure you that the vast majority of the > population will be more quickly able to determine the location of a > start and end block when the block is properly indented with whitespace. You do an experiment first: take your biggest, most important codebase, strip out all of the leading whitespace, and save it. Delete all backups and version-control repositories, so you don't cheat*. After this transformation, how fast can you get a working codebase back? [*] Well, okay, give your boss a copy of the respository, just in case. -- See? I can be just as insulting as the next guy: Being obnoxious as a means of persuasion just won't fly. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
