From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2004-10-12T06:46:55+09:00
Subject: Re: quality of error messages

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 20:26:55 +0900, Brian Candler <b.candler@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 08:06:27AM +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> > |> % ./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.
> 
> I think that you don't have to enforce any particular indentation style or
> amount of space on each line - only that it is consistent between begin and
> end.

No, no, no, and NO!

When I am writing code, I will often do:

  class Foo
    def bar
      : # some code here
  p baz # a tracer to help me find a difficult bug
      : # more code here
    end
  end

Your suggestion would force me to indent the tracer -- which I have
*purposefully* overridden the auto-formatting by vim to insert --
which leads me to the same idiocy that keeps me from Python as a first
point.

Tracer code is too useful to be bound by people who don't use editors
that help them write their code through use of automatic indentation
and/or folding.

This whole indentation-count idea is dumb.

-austin
-- 
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