Stripping of whitespaces at the end of lines

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On May 29, 2002 01:48 pm, Geoff Thorpe wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> First, if you reply to this please just send it to the list - I don't need
> personal copies of every email on this thread - what kind of foolishness
> is it where everyone hits "reply to all" on list mail??? A little
> netiquette please ...

This is how things are setup on wine-* lists. If you hit "Reply", it just goes
to you, not the list. Anyway, I'll edit the header for you from now on.

> broken lines rather than indentation levels. If you use expression
> alignment, then you are from the same school of thought that
> bastardisation of HTML is legitimate because GUI-rendering of HTML is the
> paramount consideration. There are other schools of thought that state

No, it's the other way around. You use expression alignment because
it's easier on the eye, not the automatic tool. Indentation and alignment
is essential because it conveys structure. Brackets, for that matter, are
rather useless -- if the code is not properly indented and formatted,
noone will parse the brackets to figure out the structure.

> that source code, like HTML, exists to logically describe context and
> mechanics. Logic before aesthetic. Etc. If you want to do ASCII art,
> source code is probably not the place.

We're not talking about ASCII art here, we're talking about an aesthetic
source base. If that's not important to you, we really have nothing to
talk about.

> A tab's role historically was to represent a level of indentation. Quoted

Indeed. And when you print you code, how much will the printer
indent a tab? Anyway, it seems we talk for the fun of it (?), but let
me summarize my ideas:
  -- if you can avoid mixing tabs and space, all power to you
	It is nice, generates better diffs
  -- I don't believe it pays to enforce *no* spaces at the beginning
	of the line. It's nice, I like it too, but sometimes I do use spaces.
  -- I think it's *much* simpler and  has a bigger payoff if we nicely
	recommend people use 4 space indentation, however they
	choose.

To conclude, I think source is like a picture. It is visual. You should
look at it like at a nice drawing. You will notice that in general, the tools 
used to create drawings are more about that "how" rather than about 
the "what" to do. In other words, they don't give you much abstraction.
I am a firm believer in separating content from presentation. But I'm not
at all convinced that using the very thin abstraction of \t is worth getting
religious about. Paper thin abstractions don't work. That's why people
don't use HTML to convey content but have moved to XML, leaving
HTML to worry about the presentation.


-- 
Dimi.