begin quoting David Brown as of Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 02:57:28PM -0800: > On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 02:51:24PM -0800, SJS wrote: > > >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? > > Why is this relevant?
It's an asinine response to an asinine request. How do you expect someone to respond to "If you really believed that, you would..."? > If you use a language where leading whitespace is part of the grammar, it > becomes important to preserve. That has to be weighted in as one of the > advantages/disadvantages of doing it that way. Yes. And some of us have been saying that it's a disadvantage, to have our (valid!) concerns dismissed out of hand, and then instructed to do something silly, stupid, and time-wasting. > How would this be different than asking to strip out braces with the > indentation in C code. You have about the same level of semantic > difficulty to reconstruct it. I've never seen both braces *and* indentation lost at the same time. I HAVE seen indentation trashed. Several times. It's a pain, but not crippling, if you have braces as well. The difference with stripping out indentation *and* braces in C code would be that you're removing both the definition _and_ the safeguard. Rip out the indentation OR the braces in one of my C programs, and I'll do a lot better job getting it back to a reasonable state. Do both, well, you're removing syntatically important stuff AND documentation. (Which was, really, the trick. If you comment the python or cobra code well enough, losing indentation won't matter much, as you can recreate the scoping by reading the documentation.) > I personally don't mind having both indentation and braces, but _only_ if > my editor figures out the indentation for me. That way, the indentation is > really just an artifact of the expression. If I have to think about both, > it is an unnecessary burden. It's easy enough to have a programmer's editor handle indentation with braces. Personally, I think of braces as a shortcut for keywords. I don't have a problem with "begin" and "end" to delimit blocks. -- So long as the delimiters I can see My mind to think on the problem will be free Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
