On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi All,
>> >
>> >    first, excuse the venting.  Who the %*&^$# decided to inflict the
>> > "always
>> > type a matching open/close pair" when typing any of ( [ { etc on us?
>> > Would
>> > that person please consider commiting hara kiri?
>> >
>> > OK, now slightly calmer, I find it /exceedingly/ annoying.  Is this
>> > really
>> > an appropriate default?    How does one turn it off?
>> >
>> >
>> > The cases that send me up my *&%$^# tree are when I intend to add a
>> > single
>> > one in front of some string when I go back to edit some text (e.g. add
>> > an
>> > exception handler around some phrase).  Here, typing the pair *is just
>> > broken*.  Doing it at the end of a text or at the end of line is
>> > defensible.
>> > Doing it always IS F*&^%$*G BROKEN.
>>
>> Calm down, won't you?  If you need to add an exception handler around
>> some phrase, why not just highlight the phrase and press Command+[ to
>> surround it with brackets.
>
>
> So do it *when there's an expression to enclose*, not every time you type
> the character.

Because, by doing the above, there are no cases left to need an open
paren / bracket / quote without the corresponding close.

But when I'm typing multiple nested levels of parentheses and blocks,
I don't like to have to tediously match them up when the machine can
do it for me.

>> Some people like to "edit text" and some people like to "edit
>> expressions".  Personally, I find "editing text" pretty old-school,
>> and a lot more tedious..
>
> You know, one can type non-Smalltalk in SMalltalk (class comments, snippets
> of HTML, angry messages to Squeak-dev), not just platonic Smalltalk.  And
> the Auto-enclose crap doesn't help there.

Well it does, for the same reason.  Whether typing code, prose,
comments, snippets or HTML, a close-parenthesis is sure to need to
follow an open..

I thought Alejandro's argument was somewhat entertaining, "if you need
to be typing so many nested levels it speaks about your bad code.."
Maybe, but sometimes you have to balance against number of tiny
methods and the language needs to support it no matter what, so may as
well make it easy.  :)