[NIT] Pretty pretting #ifFalse:ifTrue:

Andrew C. Greenberg werdna at mucow.com
Tue Nov 20 12:38:57 UTC 2001


On Monday, November 19, 2001, at 10:57  PM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> The general understanding of pretty-printing is that it should
> confine itself to adding and removing layout characters (space, tab,
> line break) and colouring.

I have no idea what is the "general understanding of pretty printing," 
so thus I shall defer.

I never found use for a pretty printer, except perhaps to facilitate the 
reading of large hunks of awfully written code.  To that end, any 
decent-looking semantically equivalent code sufficed.  Since even the 
worst of Smalltalk code is usually much smaller and more comprehensible, 
the pretty-printing tool seems particularly pointless in Squeak even as 
a general editor.

Thus, I am curious why some are so interested in this functionality.  
Have I been missing out on the party all these years?  Perhaps there 
could be some utility to such a tool, say, to impose coding standards on 
a development team, or to ease code typing to free coders from some 
extra keypresses.  Is that what folks use pretty-printing for?





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