Am Mi., 7. Apr. 2021 um 18:41 Uhr schrieb Thiede, Christoph <
Christoph.Thiede at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de>:

> Alright, if it only affects rendering, then it should not be a big deal to
> make a preference for it. :-)
>
>
> Well, it depends. In my hanging indent example with elastic tabstops you
would write less tab stops on the hanging lines and at least one additional
tab stop on the first line of the block. Whereas without elastic tabstops
you would push tab or space repeatedly until you are somewhat satisfied
with the results for your particular font setting, to achieve the same
looks. One source code will contain different characters (tabs) than the
other.

Some intelligent rendering that makes both codes look like indented in the
same, properly aligned way might be nice. As a compromise between
unformatted and pretty-printed browsing. With these additional ideas like
not showing the quotes, there will be at least two meanings of "pretty
print" in the future.

> My point being that Smalltalk source code is not plain text. Never has
> been. It shouldn’t be treated as such. IMHO.
>
> Well, my perspective on this question is that Smalltalk is literally small
> talk without all this nasty and complicated syntactic stuff you are used to
> from C-like languages and many others. So it's still not exactly plain
> text, but at least very near to it. You can just read (good) Smalltalk code
> like a book (and I have to say that I *love* this book :D). That's why in
> my personal opinion, Smalltalk code does not deserve a separate font
> compared to comments. :-)
>

(It is certainly better than typedef char (*pointerToArrays)[6]; but
Smalltalk, too, has its unnatural plain text/keyboard quirks/compromises
like ~= or historical syntax artifacts like the colon in block arguments—if
I remember that correctly from the evolution of Smalltalk article from last
year. And there was already a remark about the looks of := with certain
fonts.)

Comments looking like sticky notes in PDFs would be fancy. And less
portable, of course. ;-)

"This package is best browsed with Squeak 5.4, standard system browser,
elastic tabstops and automatic rendering of ←, ↑ enabled, quotes disabled,
and a display size of at least 1024x768. What do you mean, you are still
using Internet Explorer?"

Kidding aside, preferences and rendering fragmentation might, here too, be
a problem for authors and readers. No objections from me personally
against improving the tools and rendering.
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