Introducing Cobra

[SJS]

begin  quoting Christopher Smith as of Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 02:25:17PM -0800:
> SJS wrote:
> > Except that it *doesn't* improve readability.
> >
> > The eye *believes* whitespace, but it's also not very good at it.  It's
> > okay at determining that yeah, verily, there *is* whitespace, but it's
> > not very good at determining how much.  For very small programs, that's
> > okay; but these languages are no longer being used solely for small programs.
> >   
> If you honestly believed that, you shouldn't indent your code. In fact,

Um, no.  Don't be stupid.

The point is that indentation is a _hint_, and not _definitive_.

Indentation is documentation, not syntax.

> as an experiment, I encourage you to compare your code before and after
> such a transformation. I assure you that the vast majority of the
> population will be more quickly able to determine the location of a
> start and end block when the block is properly indented with whitespace.

You do an experiment first: take your biggest, most important codebase,
strip out all of the leading whitespace, and save it. Delete all backups
and version-control repositories, so you don't cheat*.

After this transformation, how fast can you get a working codebase back?

[*] Well, okay, give your boss a copy of the respository, just in case.

-- 
See? I can be just as insulting as the next guy:
Being obnoxious as a means of persuasion just won't fly.
Stewart Stremler