Re: [9fans] Using proportional fonts in Acme for Programming

[Noah Evans <noah.evans@gmail.com>]

For Lisp variants ask Alex Shinn(alexshinn@gmail.com), he's got an
interesting scheme implementation mostly working. It's a summer of
code project this year.

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 7:55 PM, Daniel Lyons<fusion@storytotell.org> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>