But the TAB is still the whitespace character you describe that is accepted in the programming language using it. Defining a new codepoint would require the lexical analyzer of these languages to be modified (you modify those languages). Clearly, given that the lexiccal items of the programming languages for the functions you describe are is a very closed subset, you cannot substitute them. All you describe is a matter of design for the UI of code editors, which will still scan the edited sources looking for TABs any not your custom character, in order to display it in a custom way, accoding to preferences of the programmer.
We are in fact not talking about the character identities (the only significant identiy here is the identity of the original characters in the source text, and the code editor will not alter it even if they display it differently (but they only "display" them, they don't replace them, unless the progrzmmer effectively makes a change to the source code (such as reindeting or compressing whitespaces, or using a source code beautifer/reformatter (which is safe to use in those editors ONLY if these editors effectively recognize not only the source characters, but also the syntax of the source language (so not only it must be able to read and scan te source, but it must also know which programming language you are using (generally it uses the file extension of the source file, but if you have still not given a filename to your source by saving it (or by adding a nod eto yuor source tree in your IDE), you can still select the programming language in the menu of the editor. The same editor can then present the source program in any convenient presentation that matches the expectations and needs of the programmers using it: it will typically provide syntax coloring, it will group/ungroup blocks of source lines (by detecting the syntax used to delimit blocks (punctuations, begin/end keywords,indentation, statement separators or operators, priority orders of operators...) The presentation made will never depend of your new "character" (and a new symbolic character is not the unique and best way to present the programming structure because the needs for progrzammers is at a higher level than isolated characters, but based on the upper-level parsing seyntax of programming blocks, statements and operations: the program can then be presented in a treeview listing nodes with sorted listed of properties, where property values can also be another tree). The tree is also not the only option: you could as well have rectangular blocks that you can expand/reduce, appearing as multine blocks of rich text containing other blocks. Additionally there could be several superposed structures that are not hierarchically embedded (e.g. one for a line-base preprocessor, another for the code as it would be understtod by the next layer, after the preprocessing layer) And even in programminag languages, there exists structures that do not obey the hierarchic structure (e.g. SGML and HTML where elements can rreely close the scope of extension of /many/ previously opened /blocks/, and not just the one that is in the top of stack When you close an eement that is not at the top of stack, the existing top of stack /may/ remain at the top of stack, or could be closed implicitly, according to complex matching rules (which depend of properties of all elements in the stack between the element you are explciitly closing and the element at top of stck) 2015-02-08 23:02 GMT+01:00 Jean-François Colson <j...@colson.eu>: > Le 08/02/15 22:32, Pierpaolo Bernardi a écrit : > > On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 9:15 PM, Alfred Zett <alfre...@web.de> wrote: > > […] > > > > -- unlike tabs or space, it wouldn't be whitespace > > […] > > > > a Tab is exactly what you described. > > Not exactly: a tab IS whitespace. > It may sometimes be displayed in a different color or with a special > symbol on request if the editor allows it, but in most cases it is > whitespace. > > > _______________________________________________ > Unicode mailing list > Unicode@unicode.org > http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode >
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