Alan Manuel Gloria: > Huh. Well, I dislike ! because I feel it's heavier visually than a line of .
I agree, I like the *look* of "." better. But we have to implement it, too, and the implementation nastiness makes me think we need an alternative. > And no, if I can't type it on a standard keyboard, it's worthless. No > unicode astral planes please! Completely agree. And a lot of symbols are already spoken for, so the choices are extremely limited. I think the other closest alternative is "~". That's not bad visually, but Arc already uses it in places where it's likely to be the first position. The arc "if" means that conditions (after the first one) are *likely* to begin a line after indentation. So I think that we should *NOT* simply say "~" is an indent character. We could say that only ~ followed by space or tab are acceptable. But then either (1) that brings us back to unread-char and friends, the problem we're having in the first place, or (2) it creates more complications in the indentation processor. We *might* be able to implement it completely in the indentation parser, without any change in the underlying reader. Perhaps the implementation could presume ~ is indentation, and consume them. If it consumes a "~" and finds out that the next character isn't a space, it could call the underlying reader, then patch up the result. That's more complicated, and there might be unforeseen implementation issue (well, unforeseen by me). Would "~ followed by space or tab" be much more visually appealing to you? Should we consider that further? I think "$" would be a lot worse than !, at least "!" is relatively un-busy. I can't think of any other symbols that wouldn't have real problems. > Also, a line composed of ........ makes me think of hidden lines in > drafting. But ! looks like: > > ! > ! > ! > ! > ! > > Alternating long and short segments is for center lines in drafting, > which doesn't seem to be appropriate for the expected use case. I don't think that's so bad. Many people use alternating segments as just another line style, typically to distinguish it from other lines. So using it for a "special" kind of line is, I think, visually reasonable. > Still, the fact that we get a way to show indentation levels *at all* is good. > > So regarding "!" as whitespace, will support but not promote. Okay, that's promising. Let's keep trying to think of a better approach. If we can't, I think this is the best one available. The period is visually appealing, but it causes too many implementation issues. --- David A. Wheeler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Readable-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/readable-discuss
