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

[Jason Catena <jason.catena@gmail.com>]

> Again, the layout mode seems to be a bug in Haskell not a feature, but
> that's not a popular belief in that community.

It's only as complex as the various levels of scope you end up needing
in your program.  Meaningful whitespace enforces a clean, readable,
delimiter-free style, making programs look more like each other.  It's
a lot easier to see (and not have in the first place) incorrect scope
and continuation with whitespace than with braces or parentheses.

Acme only has two indentation rules (nothing, or same as the existing
line), so Emacs' constant re-parsing of the file to determine the
correct indentation level is always going to be more "correct".  This
kind of programming support seems akin to me to colorful syntax
highlighting: great if you need it, distracting once you really get
good with a language.  In the case of indenting, I might not actually
code the next line right away, but auto-indent to just the right place
for it means I have to go out of my way more often to get the cursor
to where I actually want it.

> Dave

Jason Catena