From: "Brian Schröder" <ruby@...>
Date: 2004-10-12T06:59:36+09:00
Subject: Re: quality of error messages

Austin Ziegler wrote:
> 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

What are you fearing? No one proposed that the above code should:
1) not work anymore
2) produce warning messages

what was proposed is:
if there is a missing end, produce the message:
"missing a closing end. Your indentation suggests that the missing end 
could belong to 'def bar' on line 234."

So I see nobody forcing anything upon you.

No reason to CRY OUT LOUD.

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