Re: [9fans] Why does Acme only show text?

[Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:42:20 +0200
Noah Evans <noah.evans@gmail.com> wrote:

> http://9fans.net/archive/2008/05/6

Good to see this brought up. Whitespace may be the most comfortably readable means of indicating flow, but it's fragile. Better, IMHO, is delimiters with plenty of space around them, but even then they do intrude. Currently I like Q where parentheses can be used if necessary but a couple of syntactic tricks are used to keep them to the minimum and whitespace has some meaning but (IIRC) not over-much.

I find the best thing to do with languages with delimeters is to run code through a code formatter often. I'm using Gnu indent for C code (especially valuable when dealing with Gnu C :) ), is there a similar tool for Plan 9?

> 
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Jason Catena<jason.catena@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Devon's anecdote is along the lines of my position.  I'm sure there's
> > a paper somewhere that counts parenthesis versus whitespace errors,
> > but I haven't yet read it.  I have programmed Lisp and Haskell (at two
> > extremes), and from this experience at least much prefer whitespace to
> > parentheses.  In addition, I rely on design theory (esp. Tufte et al
> > on his web site) that reducing clutter aids comprehension, and
> > delimiters very much seem clutter to me.
> >
> > Jason Catena
> >
> >
>

-- 
Ethan Grammatikidis

Those who are slower at parsing information must
necessarily be faster at problem-solving.