[ENH] (?) Pretty Printing
Norton, Chris
chrisn at Kronos.com
Thu Jan 20 19:45:13 UTC 2000
Hi Dean & company.
[I haven't tried your changes yet, but here's why I avoid pretty print]
I have been avoiding pretty printing, because it does (did?) things that
obfuscated the code for me. For example, if you do an assignment as
follows:
test
| tmp aCharacter |
aCharacter _ $f.
tmp _ ($a = aCharacter)
ifTrue: ['right on!']
ifFalse: [nil]
I believe this pretty prints to:
test
| tmp aCharacter |
aCharacter _ $f.
tmp _ $a = aCharacter ifTrue: ['right on!']
OK. There are some disturbing things here for me. First off, I lost my
ifFalse: [nil]. This is bad, because, even though it may be the same code,
having the ifFalse: [nil] tells programmers (newbies esp.), that the false
case has been thought of and that the design is to have tmp set to nil.
Another thing I don't like about pretty printing is that it moved my ifTrue:
up a line.
I am a strong believer in standard formatting, however. In VSE, you have
the option of auto formatting a method and saving it that way, without
having overall formatting thoughout the image. If I could pretty print a
method and then save it, without having autoformatting on throughout Squeak,
I would be more inclined to use the feature.
Cheers & thanks!
---==> Chris
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