On Monday, 1 October 2012 at 12:56:05 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 11:42:40 +0200
"monarch_dodra" <monarchdo...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, 28 September 2012 at 17:40:17 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic
wrote:
> On 9/28/12, Bernard Helyer <b.hel...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> By the time the compiler even has a concept of an 'if
>> statement'
>> or a 'block' the whitespace is long gone. Not to say you
>> couldn't change the lexing model to detect such things,
>> but it's not a simple as you make it sound.
>
> I see, so it's an implementation limitation. I guess we'll
> have to
> resort to that dlint tool which will have to be built.
Personally, EVEN when I'm doing a 1 line if, I *still* wrap it
in a block. EG:
if(a == 0)
a = 1;
or
if(a == 0) a = 1;
Becomes:
if(a == 0)
{a = 1;}
or
if(a == 0) {a = 1;}
It might look iffy at first, but very quickly feels natural.
It may look like it requires (god forbid) "useless" typing,
but when that 1 liner becomes a 2 liner, it saves your life.
It has saved mine more than once actually!
I've done the dangling if bug often. One day I said
"no-more!". I've addopted the above format, and it has not
happened to me since.
Further more, thanks to D's ban on "if();", you can litterally
never fail with this format. I warmly recommend it to every
one.
I don't know if maybe this is somehow related to my inability
to accept
or feel comfortable with indent-based languages, but I don't
think
there's ever been a time I've forgotten to add curly braces
when adding
another statement to a one-statement 'if' or 'else' clause.
It's just
automatically the first thing I do, kinda like automatically
turning
the headlights off when I park the car (although the
"headlights" thing
is admittedly much more subconscious than the curly braces).
I'll
forget a semicolon pretty often, but the {} I haven't had a
problem
with.
I might just be weird, though.
Modern cars do have a warning system - The car makes a beep noise
when opening the door while the headlights are on to remind the
driver to turn them off.
Regarding indent-based languages - It has more cognitive costs
for the programmer:
1. Tab vs. spaces holly-wars, how many spaces to use, etc, now
become language enforced instead of a human style choice.
2. Some "redundant" syntax noise is necessary in a language, to
make it easier for humans to "see" the code, even if it's
redundant from the compiler's perspective.
A good programming language should resemble more a natural
language than a mathematically rigorous language that is easily
machine parsed. After all, we are _not_ computers. Programming
language design is after all in large part a UX/UI question.
