From: Ryan Paul <segphault@...>
Date: 2004-06-12T16:13:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Appropriate use of camelCase

> Changing tab<->spaces in a file can cause problems with your CVS environment.
> You could tell CVS to ignore the white space, but then you 
> can't check the white space that is really important.

I understand your argument about CVS. I've never used it, so i've never
had issues like that. If I had to, I would pick a particular style to use
for cvs, and just convert to that style before committing. I'd probably
write a shell script to automate it.

> I shudder at the thought. This is bordering on, ...well when
> I get a file from my friend, I reformat it to look like I
> want it to look like, changing indentation style, variable
> and method names.... Where does it stop?

Why should it stop? As long as it still compiles/executes, and we can
communicate intelligently about the content, what difference does it make
how we change it while we work on it? I'd take it a step further, if I
could. We should all have our own personal syntaxes and make parsers that
generate from our code to/from a common format - or perhaps have a
database that contains the code (I think the original dylan
implementation worked that way) and have tools that generate code in our
own personal syntaxes from the database, and vice-versa. Seriously, what
is wrong with it? Someday, Parrot might facilitate something like that.

--SegPhault