From: "Brett H. Williams" <brett_williams@...>
Date: 2003-08-22T03:15:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Punctuation as noise

On Aug 22, Ryan Pavlik wrote:
> 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>
> 
> 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.

I wrote an emacs lisp hack that acted like the highlight method of
match-paren.  If I had a cursor on the beginning or end of the block, it
would automatically highlight the block for me.

But... it was not always perfect and sometimes stopped working--I never
figured out why.

Now that I've switched to vim I can just use %, which helps a lot (thanks
to Ned Konz for his matchit support).  

But I still miss the visual feedback of the highlight.  When it worked it
was very nice.  When it intermittently stopped working I missed it.  When
it went into an infinite loop I cursed it :)  (If I could write emacs
extensions in Ruby instead of elisp, I could've fixed it :)

Certainly a forward-sexp should be easy to implement for a better elisp
hacker than myself--ruby-mode gives you the functions to determine if your
cursor is at the beginning or end of a block.

-- 
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Brett Williams                                 | 
Agilent Technologies                           | brett_williams@agilent.com
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