From: Mark Hubbart <discordantus@...>
Date: 2004-10-12T15:28:39+09:00
Subject: Re: quality of error messages

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 06:46:55 +0900, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> 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!

Yikes!
 
> 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.

Well, no, it wouldn't. In my original suggestion:
1. it was only a warning; you wouldn't be *forced* to comply with it.
2. the warning would be at a more highly defined warning level: level
3, which currently doesn't exist. So the warning would never show up
unless you run your code at that warning level.
3. I didn't directly specify this, but I intended that it would only
check indentation levels for block ends. So that puts statement would
be ignored even still.

I would shrink in horror at the thought of supporting a change that
would enforce indentation standards on other rubyists. I violate mine
often enough myself, whenever I feel that it makes my code more
readable.

Regardless, I realize now that the exact thing I proposed would not be
the best way of doing it. I described what was in my mind at the time,
knowing full well that there was likely something wrong with the idea.
:) I am quite interested in the much more mature ideas that I've seen
later on in this thread.
 
> 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.

Well, I guess that we will all have different opinions on this, but I
find myself tracking down "missing end" bugs often enough that I kinda
like the idea. As long as it only complains when there's a missing end
:)

cheers,
Mark