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Re: learning Emacs Lisp


From: Andreas Politz
Subject: Re: learning Emacs Lisp
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:57:10 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 (X11/20081018)

Richard Riley wrote:
Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de> writes:

Richard Riley wrote:
Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:

Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Richard,

[...] but Xah Lee is an excellent resource with carefully argued
points and practical approach to, amongst other things, eLisp usage.
This is a joke, isn't it?
Not in the slightest. I can only assume the bit you snipped about some
more established Emacs users disagreeing with him applies to you? Or the
tone suggests that.

When learning a language it's better to take a look at polished code
that uses this language's idioms.  Xah's on a crusade against even the
most basic stuff like correct indentation...
By correct indentation I guess you mean the established custom? I cant
disagree that customs are good but personally I think the established
custom in elisp is rather awkward to the extreme. Not that i dont try to
adhere to it :-; But even looking around the C world we see various
indentation standards and everyone is entitled to their view. A constant
style is, of course, better for everyone although it does not
immediately mean that constant style is the best. As a programmer for
years I can not even begin to understand how and why eLisp bracketing
standards became as they did other than maybe to save screen real estate
in the VT100 type days. FWIW, I think saving space is better for the eye
too in some ways but I find "at a glance" analysis of most eLisp code
almost impossible because of the standard of grouping all closing
brackets.

That darn old emacs again ! Seriously this has more to do with lisp in
general than specifically with elisp. I doubt you'd find any _one_ serious
programmer or author in the whole lisp community who proposes this kind of
style ( each closing paren on a seperate line ).

You will notice that I did not propose it. I said the standard is hard
for me to read as someone who is not an eLisp magician.

Yes, I misunderstood you. I thought you were impying this, by the comparison 
with C.

-ap

I still do not
understand (other than the reasons I postulated about above) why it is
as it is. I find it very hard to indent and match (ok, emacs helps with
matching brackets), but would find it very difficult to read from a
printout for example.

But this is more my lack of experience
possibly. All hindrances can become less so with experience. But would
aligned brackets really hurt anyone? I dont think so. It is convention
(and convention is a good thing at times) which has the style as it
is. Or?



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