From: Markus Jais <mjais@...>
Date: 2001-12-05T18:44:23+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27539] Re: ANN: REXML 1.1b1

On Wed, 05 Dec 2001 02:50:22 +0100, Sean Russell wrote:

> David Alan Black wrote:
> 
>>> I have one more request for comments:  it has been suggested that the
>>> default behavior of write() should be to *not* indent the output,
>>> rather than to *do* indent the output, which is the current behavior.
>>> REXML
> ..
>> Could you have both a (raw) write and a pretty_print or some such
>> thing?
> 
> That is the way it is right now.  If you want unformatted output, you
> pass write() a "-1".  Otherwise, it formats the output.
> 
> If people want the behavior reversed, by default the output would be
> written unformatted.  If you wanted formatting, you'd do something like
> pass write() "0", or some other number greater than 0.  In effect, I'd
> just change the default value of "indent" from 0 to -1.
> 

I think the default should be to *not* indent the output.
I would find it most intuitive, when you can pass the level of
indentation, that is

doc.write($stdout, 0) # no indentation (zero spaces)
doc.write($stdout, 1) # 1 space indentation
doc.write($stdout, 5) # 5 spaces indentation


markus