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From: wyoung@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (William J. Young)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Indenting
Message-ID: <3858@deimos.cis.ksu.edu>
Date: 5 Oct 89 00:52:32 GMT
References: <89273.185750TBC101@PSUVM.BITNET> <704@thor.wright.EDU> <9253@pyr.gatech.EDU>
Sender: news@deimos.cis.ksu.edu
Reply-To: wyoung@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (William J. Young)
Organization: Kansas State University, Dept of Computing & Information Sciences
Lines: 27

In article <9253@pyr.gatech.EDU> mlw@pyr.UUCP (Michael Williams) writes:
>
>   Anyone who deducts points for formatting inconsistent with the preferred
>method of the instructor should be forced to write FORTRAN code, where
>silly obstacles such as column numbers make a difference.  This is one of
>the advantages of pascal.  There shouldn't be a standard; it should be a
>matter of personal preference.  In fact, I have the following preference:
> ...

This "personal preference" is OK for experienced programmers.  But what about
the student who has never written any code, or who has written only code
preceeded by line numbers (small jab at unstructured BASIC :-).  I have
coded in FORTRAN, as well as BASIC and Pascal, and have taught Pascal for over
two years.  My approach was that the student should be consistent in the 
indentation style chosen, but I did give some pointers.  Unfortunately, my
experience is that nearly 50% of the students took advantage of neither my
suggestions or their own consistent style (and I do not consider left
justified consistent style :( ).  I would like to continue this discussion, as
a project I was working on about a year ago was to write a pretty printer for
Pascal.  Many problems with this.  Everyone had another "feature" they wanted.
-- Bill

--
----------------------------
Bill Young 
Internet:  wyoung@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu, wyoung%ksuvax1@harris.cis.ksu.edu
BITNET:    wyoung@ksuvax1.bitnet, wyoung%ksuvax1.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu