suggestion: clean white space / end of line definition

[Thomas Kuehne]

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Georg Wrede schrieb am 2006-11-02:
> Thomas Kuehne wrote:
>> Here is a faster mock-up
>
> (Apologies in advance, and totally ignoring the good code, standards 
> compliance and some other good things,) I have to ask:
>
> Is this a Good Thing?
>
> Admittedly not having thought through this issue myself, all I have is a 
> gut feeling. But that gut feeling says that source code (especially in a 
> systems language in the C family) should strive to hinder all kinds of 
> Funny Stuff from entering the toolchain.
>
> Accepting "foreign" characters within strings (and possibly even in 
> comments) is OK, but in the source code itself, that's my issue here.
>
> We can already have variable names in D written in Afghan and 
> Negro-Potamian, which I definitely don't consider a good idea. If we 
> were to follow this line of thought, then the next thing we know 
> somebody might demand to have all D keywords translated to every single 
> language in the bushes, and to have the compiler accept them as Equal 
> synonyms to the Original Keywords. (This actually happened with the CP/M 
> operating system in Finland in the early eighties! You don't want to 
> hear the whole story.)

Keywords are a few "magic" words, teaching those doesn't require any
knowledge of the natural language they were taken from. I definitely
agree with your view on keywords. The rest however ... sounds like a
typical culture-centric view.

Forcing everyone - especially beginners and non-IT people - to use
English isn't a viable solution. No, transliteration doesn't cut it:

mama ma ma ma

hint: This a variant of a Chinese language joke and involves 4 different
characters.

In addition there are quite a few words and concepts that have
no English equivalent. For simplicity's sake lets use an ASCII
representable German word: "Heimat"

* home - to narrow
* native country - quite often wrong

> What will this do to cross-cultural study, reuse, and copying of example
> code? Won't it eventually compatmentalize most all code written outside
> of the Anglo-Centric world? That is, alienate it from us, but also from
> each of the other cultures too.

That's what coding standards are for. The same reuse issue goes for C/C++
and the preprocessor and seems to work reasonably well.

Thomas


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