Introducing Cobra

[David Brown]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 02:51:24PM -0800, SJS wrote:

>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?

Why is this relevant?

If you use a language where leading whitespace is part of the grammar, it
becomes important to preserve.  That has to be weighted in as one of the
advantages/disadvantages of doing it that way.

How would this be different than asking to strip out braces with the
indentation in C code.  You have about the same level of semantic
difficulty to reconstruct it.

I personally don't mind having both indentation and braces, but _only_ if
my editor figures out the indentation for me.  That way, the indentation is
really just an artifact of the expression.  If I have to think about both,
it is an unnecessary burden.

Dave