[squeak-dev] Manual line breaks in code

Stéphane Rollandin lecteur at zogotounga.net
Mon Apr 4 14:43:57 UTC 2022


> I feel reminded of some recent discussions about pretty-printing. Some 
> people apparently want to control every detail of the appearance of 
> their source code (line-breaking, text composition etc.),

I would be one of these people, but I would say it otherwise:

when I layout my code, and my comments, I am writing for another human 
being (most probably myself in the future). And when I read source code, 
and comments therein, I read what another human being has written.

Indentation, line breaks, etc all convey some meaning (otherwise we 
would not even bother about formatting in the first place).

To assume that an algorithm can properly "pretty-print" a hunman output 
intended to another human, we must assume that nothing is lost in the 
process.

Now if "details" did not matter, I could have said:

I would be one of these people, but I would say it otherwise: when I 
layout my code, and my comments, I am writing for another human being 
(most probably myself in the future). And when I read source code, and 
comments therein, I read what another human being has written. 
Indentation, line breaks, etc all convey some meaning (otherwise we 
would not even bother about formatting in the first place). To assume 
that an algorithm can properly "pretty-print" a hunman output intended 
to another human, we must assume that nothing is lost in the process. Or 
maybe I could have said:
I would be one of these people,
but I would say it otherwise:
when I layout my code,
and my comments,
I am writing for another human being
(most probably myself in the future).
And when I read source code,
and comments therein,
I read what another human being has written.
Indentation,
line breaks,
etc all convey some meaning
(otherwise we would not even bother about formatting in the first place).
To assume that an algorithm can properly "pretty-print" a hunman output 
intended to another human,
we must assume that nothing is lost in the process.

But to me, these details matter.

Stef


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