Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hplextra!hplb!gw
From: gw@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Gunther Walther)
Subject: Re: Smalltalk formatting styles...
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Date: Fri, 12 May 1995 13:39:37 GMT
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Bill Smith (bsmith@odi.com) wrote:
: latyr@iastate.edu (Leslie A Tyrrell) wrote:

: >ParcPlace's placement of the ] brackets uses even less vertical space-
: >but I personally don't like counting the brackets to be sure the blocks
: >are closed where I think they are closed.

: Counting brackets??  Have you ever used the feature whereby you double
: click within the bracket to see the matching bracket?

Now without going deeper into this counting backets business,
let me point out an additional advantage of having the bracket
on a seperate line, that has not been mentioned so far:

		Editability

Decent editors (e.g. vi 8-) have efficient means to deal with
lines. Now if the last bracket is on a seperate line, then all
the lines in a block are interchangeable and can be rearranged
without a lot of mouseclicks.


On another issue. Some people have suggested that it ought to
be possible to hack the VW formatter to produce a better result.
I (not having looked into it very deeply) am not too optimistic
about it. The VW formatter is a lot more a decompiler than a
formatter. As such it is not really geared towards handling
comments. My ideal formatter would try to preserve the formatting
by the programmer as much as possible. This would require
extracting formatting information from the text being formated.


gunther

Ps: please let us not start an editor war, I mentioned vi because
    it is very line oriented. There are other editors which are
    capable to deal with more complicated formats that are not
    line oriented. Maybe my point is that the current ST editor
    (at least in VW) is not very appropriate.

Ps: As far as I understand what has been said in this thread, we
    should all agree to disagree. Now an ideal formatter should
    allow us to overcome these disagreements, without manual
    work or loosing the intention of the programmer expressed
    in special formatting. The ideal formatter should be
    configurable and maybe even programable. It should be
    portable accross different ST implementations. And it should
    have been written a long time ago...

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