[Haskell] Re: Use of tab characters...

JP Bernardy jyp_7 at yahoo.com
Sun Jan 25 15:05:32 EST 2004


--- "Sean L. Palmer" <seanpalmer at verizon.net> wrote:
> Joking aside, surely you intelligent people realize
> that the internals of a
> file format have nothing whatsoever to do with the
> user interface of the
> editing tool.  Something like this would be
> completely transparent *if* you
> used the right tools.
> 
> This just shows how deeply ingrained the ascii plain
> text mindset is in the
> programming community.  I don't expect anything like
> this to ever fly, for
> this reason.  You guys won't let it.  :(

Mmmmm... The dark side clouds everything...

Seriously, Plain Text (TM) is a proven technology for
editing code, and leveraging the power of XML just
to improve over indentation might be off-target.

Seriously, programs can (or should...) be encoded at a
level of abstraction that matches their semantics
more closely than matrix of caracters, and you're
right to raise the issue.

Seriously, Haskell is already so powerful (read:
enables the programmer to define it own astractions)
that any layer above it is easily useless.

Obviously, something can be done though;
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/hare.html

Just some thoughts...

Cheers!
JP.


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