4 ms·

why do you think it was a bad choice?

ginko 4mo ago
It‘s a source of problems with mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members for fairly little upside. Imo it also makes moving blocks of code more cumbersome.
- miffi 4mo ago
  Shrubbery, Rhombus's first-pass indentation-sensitive syntax, has a syntax form to facilitate copy-paste. With guillemets, « and », you can make a section of Shrubbery code indentation-insensitive. The idea for copy-paste it to "armor" the section you want to copy with guillemets in the right places, and unarmoring it after posting. This needs editor support to do fluidly, but imo it's much better than trying to copy-paste the indentation-sensitive syntax. The Guillemets syntax is described here: <https://docs.racket-lang.org/shrubbery/group-and-block.html#%28part._guillemet%29 https://docs.racket-lang.org/shrubbery/group-and-block.html#...> I can't tell from my 5 minutes of poking DrRacket whether it supports this "armoring", I've been writing Shrubbery in nvim, which, unsurprisingly, does not support it.
  - adastra22 4mo ago
    That's horrifying.
    - rscho 4mo ago
      At least it shows that the authors are aware of this issue and planned for it.
  - soegaard 4mo ago
    In DrRacket mark the section (with shift+arrows) then use tab or shift+tab.
- rmunn 4mo ago
  Any language with significant indentation ends up specifying "Indent with spaces, not tab characters" for just that reason. As I recall, Python had that as a recommendation while F# ended up with it as a requirement, but it's been a while since I looked at that so I could be wrong. But in my experience, the category "people who complain about significant whitespace" is nearly a subset of the category "people who prefer tabs over spaces for indentation". (Moving blocks of code around is not a real problem if your editor is capable of easily highlighting the thing that was just pasted. Because then you just hit that key binding, then press `>` or `<` — or Tab/Shift+Tab if you are using an inferior editor ;-) — until the indentation is where you need it. I haven't found it to be a big problem in practice when writing Python, though mileage will likely vary).
  - adrian_b 4mo ago
    For me, the alternative solution makes much more sense for a language with significant indentation, i.e. to use only tabs for indentation and to completely prohibit spaces before the first printable character of a line. I do not know why I have never seen this solution in practice.
    - rmunn 4mo ago
      It depends on the language's indentation requirements. That can work in Python, where you never need to line things up with characters above that aren't a multiple of an indent level. But in F#, at least a few years ago when I tried it, there are times when you would need (or strongly want) to line things up with other characters. For example, this example from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/style-guide/formatting https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/style-guide/...: functionName arg1 arg2 arg3 (function | Choice1of2 x -> 1 | Choice2of2 y -> 2) Note how the | needs one extra space in order to line up with the word "function", due to the open parenthesis. If you're using tabs for indentation, that means you need a series of tabs plus one trailing space after the tabs, in order to line up the | correctly. Any situation where you must have a mixture of tabs and spaces for code to work right leads to a nightmare. Because it makes you have to turn on visible whitespace in your editor and peer closely at the lines. I have a simple rule: "Do NOT make me care whether there are tabs or spaces in this file!" If it's significant whether a line is indented with a tab or space, then that rule is broken, and you're probably in for a bad time. (Case in point: Makefile syntax).
- IshKebab 4mo ago
  That's why you use an autoformatter. IMO the biggest downside is that it gets awkward to do closures and inline expressions and things like that. For example Python's `lambda` and if-else expression which are super weird and special snowflakey compared to the equivalents in e.g. Rust or OCaml or even Tcl. Maybe there's a way to do it nicely; I haven't thought about it too much.
  - ginko 4mo ago
    You can't autoformat broken indentation with significant whitespace since it would make the program not parse (or parse incorrectly)
    - IshKebab 4mo ago
      I was responding to > mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members
      - ginko 4mo ago
        Well yes. Say you check out a project that's all tabs but your editor is using spaces for indentation. You change a line and now the program is broken. Calling the auto-formatter won't help you.
        IshKebab 4mo ago
        This is literally not a problem. All Python projects use 4-space indentation. You would not have your editor configured for tabs when editing a Python program. It's really not an issue at all in practice. The issue of making moving code more awkward is true but really barely an inconvenience. It's not difficult to select it and press tab a couple of times. As I said the biggest issue is with closures and expressions that you might want on one line.
        ginko 4mo ago
        >This is literally not a problem. All Python projects use 4-space indentation. Tell that to the one team at my old workplace that used spaces for all their scripts. Like I said it’s a stupid source of errors that can be mitigated through style guides and tooling but it’s still a source of errors.

ginko 4mo ago

It‘s a source of problems with mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members for fairly little upside. Imo it also makes moving blocks of code more cumbersome.

miffi 4mo ago
Shrubbery, Rhombus's first-pass indentation-sensitive syntax, has a syntax form to facilitate copy-paste. With guillemets, « and », you can make a section of Shrubbery code indentation-insensitive. The idea for copy-paste it to "armor" the section you want to copy with guillemets in the right places, and unarmoring it after posting. This needs editor support to do fluidly, but imo it's much better than trying to copy-paste the indentation-sensitive syntax. The Guillemets syntax is described here: <https://docs.racket-lang.org/shrubbery/group-and-block.html#%28part._guillemet%29 https://docs.racket-lang.org/shrubbery/group-and-block.html#...> I can't tell from my 5 minutes of poking DrRacket whether it supports this "armoring", I've been writing Shrubbery in nvim, which, unsurprisingly, does not support it.
- adastra22 4mo ago
  That's horrifying.
  - rscho 4mo ago
    At least it shows that the authors are aware of this issue and planned for it.
- soegaard 4mo ago
  In DrRacket mark the section (with shift+arrows) then use tab or shift+tab.
rmunn 4mo ago
Any language with significant indentation ends up specifying "Indent with spaces, not tab characters" for just that reason. As I recall, Python had that as a recommendation while F# ended up with it as a requirement, but it's been a while since I looked at that so I could be wrong. But in my experience, the category "people who complain about significant whitespace" is nearly a subset of the category "people who prefer tabs over spaces for indentation". (Moving blocks of code around is not a real problem if your editor is capable of easily highlighting the thing that was just pasted. Because then you just hit that key binding, then press `>` or `<` — or Tab/Shift+Tab if you are using an inferior editor ;-) — until the indentation is where you need it. I haven't found it to be a big problem in practice when writing Python, though mileage will likely vary).
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  For me, the alternative solution makes much more sense for a language with significant indentation, i.e. to use only tabs for indentation and to completely prohibit spaces before the first printable character of a line. I do not know why I have never seen this solution in practice.
  - rmunn 4mo ago
    It depends on the language's indentation requirements. That can work in Python, where you never need to line things up with characters above that aren't a multiple of an indent level. But in F#, at least a few years ago when I tried it, there are times when you would need (or strongly want) to line things up with other characters. For example, this example from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/style-guide/formatting https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/style-guide/...: functionName arg1 arg2 arg3 (function | Choice1of2 x -> 1 | Choice2of2 y -> 2) Note how the | needs one extra space in order to line up with the word "function", due to the open parenthesis. If you're using tabs for indentation, that means you need a series of tabs plus one trailing space after the tabs, in order to line up the | correctly. Any situation where you must have a mixture of tabs and spaces for code to work right leads to a nightmare. Because it makes you have to turn on visible whitespace in your editor and peer closely at the lines. I have a simple rule: "Do NOT make me care whether there are tabs or spaces in this file!" If it's significant whether a line is indented with a tab or space, then that rule is broken, and you're probably in for a bad time. (Case in point: Makefile syntax).
IshKebab 4mo ago
That's why you use an autoformatter. IMO the biggest downside is that it gets awkward to do closures and inline expressions and things like that. For example Python's `lambda` and if-else expression which are super weird and special snowflakey compared to the equivalents in e.g. Rust or OCaml or even Tcl. Maybe there's a way to do it nicely; I haven't thought about it too much.
- ginko 4mo ago
  You can't autoformat broken indentation with significant whitespace since it would make the program not parse (or parse incorrectly)
  - IshKebab 4mo ago
    I was responding to > mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members
    - ginko 4mo ago
      Well yes. Say you check out a project that's all tabs but your editor is using spaces for indentation. You change a line and now the program is broken. Calling the auto-formatter won't help you.
      - IshKebab 4mo ago
        This is literally not a problem. All Python projects use 4-space indentation. You would not have your editor configured for tabs when editing a Python program. It's really not an issue at all in practice. The issue of making moving code more awkward is true but really barely an inconvenience. It's not difficult to select it and press tab a couple of times. As I said the biggest issue is with closures and expressions that you might want on one line.
        ginko 4mo ago
        >This is literally not a problem. All Python projects use 4-space indentation. Tell that to the one team at my old workplace that used spaces for all their scripts. Like I said it’s a stupid source of errors that can be mitigated through style guides and tooling but it’s still a source of errors.