On Aug 13, 2009, at 3:14 AM, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:

So, I was browsing around the other day looking at Acme resources, and I discovered an old post from 1995 wherein someone advocated the use of proportional fonts for programming in Acme. This surprised me, to say the least. He even went as far as to mention that SML was the language they were using, and had managed to get a decent indenting pattern for it that was just as readable, without messing things up for proportional font users.

I have to admit that I'm a bit skeptical about whether such a technique actually works, and so, I thought I would pose some questions to you.

Bjarne Stroustrup actually advocates this style in "The C++ Programming Language."

This discussion reminds me of this elastic tab stops concept:

 http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/

I don't think it made it into any editors, but it would support the kind of fancy alignment I like to have in my code while also supporting real fonts, which I would prefer to use.

Thirdly, would you continue using proportional width fonts in cases like Lisp code, where you very often see something like the following indentation scheme, and how would you resolve these indentation problems with proportional width fonts if you did continue to use them?

       (let ([foo bar]
             [something else])
         (some-func (called again)
                   (with fun indentation)
          (and yet)
          (another)))

I bet you could set up Emacs to use a proportional font. It can do anything, right? :)

I'd love it if Acme or Plan 9 had good support for some kind of Lisp variant.

—
Daniel Lyons