>IOW I don't like editors that store in formats that are nearly useless in other editors.
I total agree with this statement, proportional editors are only good if you are the only one who will ever look at the code, if anyone else EVER looks at it, it's just a giant mess, you can't put snippets of it in pastebin for ask for help, or really collaborate in anyway with anyone else without manually re-formatting it for a monospaced font, and there is really no point in even bothering. I find Consolas VERY easy on the eyes and have no problems organizing my code with it. I, l, 1, AND | are all distinctly different with it as well as 0 and O. I have a REAL pet peeve about font's that these characters look identical, unfortunately Arial is one of them, and guess what font stock installations of windows use.. and the VAST majority of windows users have no idea it can be changed, never mind how to change it.. My son's teacher sent home spelling words typed in Arial and my son was spelling Illusion - i i i u s i o n because it was just not clear what the characters were. When writing code we have a LOT of variables and such that are not normal readable words so it's a really bad idea to have a font with any questionability in what the characters are at all. Also a lot of proportional font indent corrections only work if your font is a particular size, if you change your mind and decide you are getting older and now need a larger font than you did 10 years ago, now all your code that used to look good, is all misaligned. The only way code will be properly aligned all the time, in any editor, at any size is to use a monospaced font, and do not use tabs at all, set your editor to insert spaces for tabs. The only thing that ever looks good all the time to everyone is a nice grid of character cells. Even if an editor COULD make it come out right with a proportional font, you are back to now having code that only one person can ever read, making it useless, so why bother with the effort at all... it's also impossible to autocorrect every situation with a proportional font.. for example: P_Range[1,0]:=0; I_Range[1,1]:=0; W_Range[2,0]:=0; R_Range[2,1]:=1; With a monospaced font, they are all perfectly aligned, but with a proportional font, there is nothing the editor could do automatically to fix this. Sure you could put some space between the variable and the [ and try to adjust that space in a reverse proportional method, but that doesn't make it look right, and you CAN'T stick any space in the actual variable name to make all the _Range align again once the initial proportional letter has fouled everything up. I have been programming for a long time, (also started with a VIC20) and I just don't see how structured programming can be done effectively with a proportional font.. you will spend more time trying to force the proportional font to look good than actual programming. As it mentions on the Freepascal wiki, pascal itself doesn't require any formatting, you can put your whole program on one long line if you want, but no one else will ever understand it. The formatting is for our benefit, so why would you use some kind of editor that now takes all your nice formatting and saves it in a way that requires a specific editor to read. The spacing and formatting is much more important that the actual reading of individual 'words' in a program, you need to identify the variable you are working on quickly and follow the structure accurately, thus monospaced fonts are far and away the best choice for this. -----Original Message----- From: fpc-pascal-boun...@lists.freepascal.org [mailto:fpc-pascal-boun...@lists.freepascal.org] On Behalf Of Marco van de Voort Sent: Monday, November 21, 2016 2:26 PM To: FPC-Pascal users discussions <fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org> Subject: Re: [fpc-pascal] Underscores in numerical literals - grouping In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said: [ Charset UTF-8 unsupported, converting... ] > On 2016-11-21 16:05, J?rgen Hestermann wrote: > > Why? > > I like monospaced fonts for code very much. > > See my reply to Stephen. More intelligent editors can let you use > monospaced and proportional fonts with ease - yet you don't loose code > alignment, indentation etc. Elastic Tabstops do just that. It's simply > about editors becoming more clever about there text rendering instead > of forcing everything into a grid of character cells. > > Plus proportional fonts overall look much better than monospaced ones. > ;-) IMHO editors should be like network protocols. Liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you write. IOW I don't like editors that store in formats that are nearly useless in other editors. _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
