From: Ryan Pavlik <rpav@...>
Date: 2003-08-22T03:06:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Punctuation as noise

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 09:52:08 +0900
Eric Schwartz <emschwar@pobox.com> wrote:

<snip>
> One of the hardest things for me to get used to in Ruby still is the
> lack of braces and semicolons.  Without braces, I'm always nervous
> about where my statments are beginning and ending (ruby-mode.el
> doesn't seem to let me use {forward,backward}-sexp to move around
> blocks), and without semicolons (or statment delimiter of choice), I'm
> always a bit nervous about where a statement is ending.  
<snip>

Well, about semicolons, I dunno.  Statement ends at the EOL, unless it
obviously doesn't (you end with a , or + or something).

However, blocks have presented an issue.  I have a theory about
character variety which I won't go into depth here on (basically,
there's a certain level of character variety that makes things easy to
read at a glance; too much or too few non-alphanumerics and you have
problems), but I've come up with a solution that works for blocks for
me:

    class Foo
    end #c:Foo

    module A
    end #M:A

I would have issues, where in a class definition more that a screen, I
wouldn't always hit the right 'end', and end up adding the method
outside the class or the like.  (Lots of module depth.)  The issue went
away immediately as I started using block end tags.  I use the
following:

    #c:CLASS
    #M:MODULE
    #m:METHOD
    #b:BLOCK      <-- rarely used

Of course, as you said, in C etc., the editor shows you what block you
came from.  At least in the ruby emacs mode, this isn't the case.

-- 
Ryan Pavlik <rpav@users.sf.net>

"Let super-dimensional physics take its course!" - 8BT