Re: [9fans] Emacs

[anothy@cosym.net]

// Shouldn't the editor promote... the One True Brace Style ?

in breif, no.

while i'm as much a fan of the style you've likely got in mind as i
imagine most people here are - IN C - it's not universal. as my
interjection there should have prompted, the first concern is that
i'm not always writing C. heck, i don't know about others here, but
_i'm_ not always writing _code_! i use Acme for pretty much all my
text editing needs, from coding to scratch notes to documentation
to printed letters to humans, to email. as often as not (at least),
imposing the One True Brace Style would be more of a burden than a
win. and that says nothing of languages that have differing styles
of syntax. i can only imagine how awkward using the auto-indent
style you're proposing would make programming in some of the
APL-like matrix/array math languages.

and, of course, there's the less theoretical, more practical
concern that pretty much every auto-indent system i've seen gets
things horridly wrong when faced with non-standard use, where
non-standard includes such wild and exotic things as cutting and
pasting code.

i'd further note that acme's brace matching makes it quite easy
to simply write your code ignoring the first tab and injecting it
later. and _surely_ (hopefully?) you're not advocating that the
editor understand the _language_, and impose auto-indenting
"features" on things like statements after if, for, etc.?
anothy