On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 03:00:59 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
The sane option are either to acknowledge that code is in a text file and choose syntax construct that make it readable (python) or decorrelate the presentation of the code from its actual form in the file and use a formatted.
Out of the two options, I would say that the correctness of the source should not be dependent on how it is formatted. One advantage of this, is that you can compact the source by removing all unnecessary white space and line returns. Another reason is that source code can be automatically generated without the costly complication of having to correctly format it.
Compacted source code works well for transmission over a network and for storage in a database. Sure, speeds are high and storage is cheap, but if you consider something like javascript, there's an overall huge amount of continual resource waste when needlessly formatted code is transmitted, interpreted, and stored. This is why JS code is usually compacted when it goes into a release state.
--rt
