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From: cg@myrias.UUCP (Chris Gray)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: DME space optimizations
Message-ID: <513@myrias.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Jul-87 13:19:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: myrias.513
Posted: Thu Jul  2 13:19:03 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jul-87 11:15:21 EDT
References: <8706270249.AA03832@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Myrias Research, Edmonton
Lines: 30

There have been a few comments lately about DME's habit of not preserving the
exact structure of whitespace in a file being edited.

My editor, Ded (good thing Matt decided not to call his that!), which is
part of my Draco distribution (Fish disks 76 and 77), does similar things.
Internally, all whitespace is represented as bytes where the high bit is
set and the low 7 bits represent 1 - 127 spaces of whitespace. Thus, the form
of whitespace is lost. It has options of outputting whitespace as all blanks,
standard 8 character tabs, or the compressed form (which the compiler
understands, also).

About the only reason I can see for wanting the exact form of whitespace
preserved in program source (or almost anything else for that matter) is in
character and string constants. There, I usually use '\t' to represent a tab
if I want one. For those cases where you want to line things up using actual
tabs, I put a kludge into Ded - if a special character (control character,
including tab) or a character with the high bit set is encountered inside
quotes, then it is preserved as is, both on input, and on output. This
handles most cases. You might want to try it, Matt. Actually I had to take
it out for apostophes's, since they are used too much as just apostrophe's.

The versions of uu{en|de}code that I use (also in my distribution) use the
newer form, where blanks are replaced by graves. This form is much more
likely to make it through all of the various mailers, systems, etc. that
postings can go through. In particular, the mainframe at the U of A here
by default trims all but one trailing blank from all lines read or written.
The uu{en|de}code on this UNIX system uses that form.
-- 
Chris Gray		Myrias Research, Edmonton	+1 403 432 1616
	{seismo!mnetor,ubc-vision,watmath,vax135}!alberta!myrias!cg