From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2004-06-12T19:52:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Appropriate use of camelCase

Hi --

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, Ryan Paul wrote:

> > 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.

One thing that's wrong with it is that I do not consider myself (or
the majority of other people) coming up with as nice a syntax as Matz
has.  Seriously -- didn't we all start using Ruby in large part
because we thought Ruby syntax and visual style were wonderful?  :-)


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net