Silly brackets (Was: Re: Problems extending Python with C.)

[François Pinard]

"Martin v. Loewis" <martin at loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de> writes:

> > I believed, for years, that C compilers should have an option to
> > emit warning diagnostics when indentation is not consistent with
> > brackets.  It is a big waste, in my opinion, that compilers ignore
> > all that redundancy, while it could be used to better help
> > programmers.

> One of the problems is that C uses a preprocessor, which often does funny
> things to indentation, making the notion of column number meaningless to
> preprocessor output.  Combine this with the common approach of implementing
> the preprocessor as a separate process, and you'll see that what you
> want is very hard to implement.

I would not think it is a problem, as #define's all expand into one line,
and there is nothing to report about brackets which match on the same line.
Could you provide an example of pre-processor breaking user indentation?

> That, of course, says nothing whether it would be desirable to have
> such a feature.  I'm quite certain that you'd get *a lot* of warnings
> for most of today's code.

Not mine! :-).  Many people like to write neatly, you might be surprised.
Others do not have to use that feature, if they do not feel like it.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard