Adding D Editor Support

Ty Tower tytower at hotmail.com
Thu Jun 19 22:44:05 PDT 2008


Georg Wrede Wrote:

> John A. De Goes wrote:
> > Looks great! I'll add it to the templates. All the examples so far
> > have used block-aligned styling:
> > 
> > a { }
> > 
> > In Java, for example, the most popular convention by far is to place
> > the opening brace at the end of the preceding line. Are the examples
> > I've seen representative of the more popular conventions within the D
> > community?
> 
> Most of programming examples you can see in textbooks (and of course on 
> many web sites) use the brace-at-end-of-line. People who've learnt to 
> program from them get used to the "look", and then of course perceive it 
> as prettier.
> 
> Now, there are a couple of (rational) reasons for this custom. One is, 
> in short examples it is nice to have the entire code snippet as short as 
> possible, so that you can view some of the explaining text both before 
> and after the code snippet at a glance.
> 
> The other reason is, in textbooks there's a scarcity of dead wood. The 
> publisher has to enforce brevity, and this is (from his POV) an 
> unobtrusive way to achieve much of it.
> 
> 
> In an environment where yuou aren't constrained by space, it soon 
> becomes practice to use the braces-on-own-lines convention. It uses more 
> space, but if your screen has a resolution that allows it, then you 
> don't care.
> 
> Code with braces on their own lines is more manageable. One can grep for 
> opening/closing braces, programs get clearer to grasp at a glance, etc. 
> (Yes I know, now 500 people are going to contest my position. All I can 
> say is, what one is used to looks clearer and more natural. But I'm 
> talking a bigger perspective here.)
> 
> On a 25-line monitor I'd use the brace-at-end convention, too.
> 
> Oh, and the end result: I see no significan difference between C, C++, 
> Java, and a few other languages, versus D, in the choice of bracing. 
> It's mostly just a programmer preference. And both are used.


Quote from George
"The other reason is, in textbooks there's a scarcity of dead wood. The
publisher has to enforce brevity, and this is (from his POV) an
unobtrusive way to achieve much of it."

Well George if this is good and valid info I will eat my hat.
Puts the credibility of the rest of your writing in doubt.

Pick up most programming texts and they are crammed with 
"Here is what this chapter will teach you"
"Here is a load of unnecessary garbage"
"Here is the guts of it"
"Here is what you have learnt in this chapter"
"Here's what we will cover in the next chapter"

and so on , so there is not much care about brevity that I have seen!



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