Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!cs.ed.ac.uk!db From: db@cs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry) Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional Subject: Re: "off-side rule" Message-ID: <4842@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk> Date: 22 Jan 91 15:02:15 GMT References: Sender: nnews@cs.ed.ac.uk Reply-To: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry) Distribution: comp Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U Lines: 22 In article spot@CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Draves) writes: > >While it's true that one can use indentation to replace grouping, i >think this is quite dangerous. Many programs feel free to change the >spacing in a program. emacs will often convert between tabs and >spaces. some implementations of cpp converts tabs to spaces. I really don't see this as a problem. All the compiler has to do is to convert tabs back to spaces before applying the off-side rule. Many compilers do this anyway to generate error messages that contain the position of the erroneous character(s). The fact that Miranda apparently doesn't do this is to my mind a design error in Miranda. Of course things get more complicated if people set tabs at different intervals than the standard every 8th position. But this can be dealt with, for example by a special declaration to declare tab settings. -- Dave Berry, LFCS, Edinburgh Uni. db%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk "The Berlin Wall; the border between East and West Germany. It's very narrow." "*Was* very narrow. Get your tenses right." -- Douglas Adams, THHGTTG.