Hi all!

This thread slided away from what I was trying to talk about. Sure,
interesting as always but...

Personally I think pretty printing is useful - but I never use it. I
tend to agree with Andreas that the code *as written* includes hints and
information that I don't want to loose, like whitespace and various
formattings of nested blocks.

Another thing is that I think pretty printing is *hard*: For example
code with blocks tend to be hard to format according to rules so that it
always "looks good". I have given up on trying to figure out what my own
personal rules are - I seem to always adapt my style to the code at
hand.

"Chris Becker" <chbecker at neo.rr.com> wrote:
> At issue here, though, is whether we can "legislate" style. You can't treat
> code like sausage, extruding it through a meat grinder when a method is
> accepted so it all comes out uniformly (cat gut not included). ;-)

That is NOT what I was trying to do. Again - I agree with Andreas and I
am NOT proposing a strict coding convention here. Actually - I think you
people might have misunderstood what I meant with "stylifier". I did not
talk about a pretty printer, rather an SLint thing. A way for us to make
sure that code that enters the base packages follows the rules
(whichever rules we decide to have, if we do).

I just want us to think if we can agree on *a few simple rules*.

For example - is it really too much to ask that comments which are meant
to be full sentences are formatted accordingly to proper english? (first
word with capital letter, ending with a period)

Or is it really too much to ask that all classes have a class comment?
Even if it is only one or two lines? Missing class comments is IMHO
totally unacceptable *in the standard packages*.

So please people, could we get back to this issue? Do you agree with me
that a few simple rules could actually be a good thing to have regarding
the code in the "standard" Squeak packages?

regards, Göran