From: "Brian Schröder" <ruby@...>
Date: 2004-10-08T17:52:12+09:00
Subject: Re: quality of error messages

Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> On Friday, October 8, 2004, 10:14:56 AM, Brian wrote:
> 
> 
>>Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>In message "Re: quality of error messages"
>>>    on Fri, 8 Oct 2004 05:28:55 +0900, Brian Schr�der
>>><ruby@brian-schroeder.de> writes:
>>>
>>>|> % ./script.rb
>>>|> script.rb:6: warning: inconsistent indentation level. 
>>>|> script.rb:13: parse error
>>>|> 
>>>|> This should make it easy to find such errors.
>>>
>>>|That seems like a nice idea to me. This would be nearly the same as the
>>>|autoindenter so, only that it does not indent but spit out warnings.
>>>
>>>I'm afraid that it might cause tab-space indentation war like in the
>>>Python community.  The issue is much smaller though, since it is not
>>>mandatory.
>>>
>>>							matz.
>>>
>>
>>Therefore I like the idea of using a high warning level or a seperate
>>program for this task. By now I normally
>>  - mark everything
>>  - M-x indent-region
>>  - Look where something is weird.
> 
> 
> The unfortunate thing about this is that editor-based indenters never
> seem to work perfectly.  e.g. what to do with here-docs?  Ruby is a
> difficult language to indent.  Consequently I tend to use the feature
> locally, not on the whole file.
> 

I've got to say I'm quite impressed with xemacs indentation. (Thanks 
matz). The only things (but those are really hard to do) are:

indentations when escaping from a string:
<<EOT
blah #{indent do
          this
        end}
EOT

Indentation of lines ending with an operator
line1 +
   line 2 +
   line 3

does not work, so I always use
line 1 + \
line 2 + \
line 3

> 
>>If a program could guide where I look that would be nice. Therefore also
>>an external program or an xemacs plugin would be nice to me.
> 
> 
> An external program would be terrific, just becuase it could be used
> independently, and also in any editor.

And in any case in an external ruby script perfect indentation would be 
easyer to implement than in elisp.

regards,

Brian

-- 
Brian Schr�der
http://ruby.brian-schroeder.de/