On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 11:15 AM, Erik Christiansen <dva...@internode.on.net> wrote: [...] > In short, colouring all 'C' keywords, merely because they are keywords, > strikes me as equivalent to this comment in usefulness: > > elephants++ ; // Increment elephants. > > (Incidentally, the example is not artificial. Such facile comments have > been produced by folk paid to program.) [...]
I've seen them too. Possibly due to the self-styled "programming experts" who never write a line of code but insist that every single line must have a comment (and I have met such people, they are no figment of my imagination). Myself, I am a partisan of heavy commenting, but I stop "just short" of purely redundant comments like the above: for instance, when writing a keymap I might code the Unicode character of the {rhs} as part of the "code" and add the hex codepoint and Unicode codepoint name in a comment, even to some people that would be "almost" as redundant as what you showed. — A few decades ago I have on occasion had to (understand and) debug spaghetti code written by others, with no flowchart available (so my first task was to write one from the source code), and I know what a PITA it can be. When I wrote assembler code, operation codes were in their own column on the coding sheet, with labels to the left and operands to the right, so colours were largely unnecessary (not that they were available: the printers of that time printed only in black, and there were no terminals: we gave Hollerith cards, and usually also magtapes and disks, and we got back 132-column zig-zag listings in a single 10 cpi all-caps font). Not so with C or vimscript (or even with the COBOL or ALGOL of a half century ago): here the code runs all over the page width and the colours start to become more useful, e.g. to distinguish variables, commands and functions from each other, or to mark off everything within an if 0 … endif construct (which could span ten pages of screen) as temporarily commented off (and why use "if 0 { … }" even in C? Simple: so you don't need to touch any /* … */ inside the range). What _is_ possible if you find that the default colors are too much bang-in-the-face is to use a more subdued colorscheme, either an existing one or an own-coded one. But if you really prefer no syntax highlighting at all, that is of course your choice, and Vim (with all its options) is all about choice, so who am I to dispute it? After all, even though I use syntax highlighting I disable syntax-related autoindenting. Best regards, Tony. -- -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_use" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to vim_use+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.