Alien whitespace eating nanovirus strikes again!

[Michael P. Reilly]

Randall Hopper <aa8vb at yahoo.com> wrote:
: Aahz Maruch:
:  |Paul Prescod  <paul at prescod.net> wrote:
:  |>
:  |>...whitespace handling....
:  |
:  |...this is one point that still annoys me.
:  |
:  |Oh, I've gotten used to it, no question about that, and I even
:  |appreciate the readability when it comes to working over someone else's
:  |code (which is what I've mostly been doing).  But the whitespace problem
:  |is a real PITA when it comes time to make a change to the structure of a
:  |program -- it's an investment I don't mind making when I'm doing "real"
:  |programming, but when I'm making a bunch of quick, fiddly changes to
:  |debug something it continually gets in my way.

: I actually have like Python's whitespace-as-syntax, but I can see your
: perspective.  

: If I was still locked onto vi, it'd be a pain, and I can see that being an
: issue with some editors.  Though with emacs, there's rectangular kill
: (^Xrk) and block indent/dedent (^X^I) -- key sequences I use without even
: thinking anymore.

I don't even see it as a problem in vi.  There are pretty simple block
operations (:'a,.s/^/  /) that make it easy enough (as easy as vi can
be anyway).

Given the problem of multiple coders and "proper whitespace" (insert
your definition here), there is _usually_ going to be an indent/outdent
problem, regardless of the language or the editor.

  -Arcege