Ben Booth: > When I was mucking around with indented grammars awhile ago, I too came to > the realization that "column counting" is opening a bag of worms and not > worth the effort. Unless you're writing a text editor, web browser or a > terminal emulator, it seems best to try to avoid such details when > possible, and treat text as an indivisible string of characters with > indeterminate length. Just my 2 cents.
With a caveat (that you may have intended) I agree with you. The caveat is that I think it's reasonable to assume that a given sequence of indentation characters (in our case just space/tab/bang), if they start from the (left) edge, will have a consistent visual length. That caveat is *far* weaker than the magical-ENLIST requirement, and *is* pretty easy to make true. Yes, that caveat isn't true if you use full justification. But anyone who thinks enabling full justification is a good idea in an indentation-sensitive programming language will get what they deserve :-). I don't even know of a general-purpose programming language editor that *has* full justification, but I presume any such mutant would enable turning it off....! --- David A. Wheeler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb _______________________________________________ Readable-discuss mailing list Readable-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/readable-discuss
