Sliding Syntax

[davidn]

ravenworks! Mine's going backwards now.



I shouldn't be too surprised by the sliding syntax highlighting, as Eclipse's normal state is of Boris Johnson-like levels of confusion anyway, but that's the first time I've seen it quite so consistent about anything.

Also pictured is my dreadful top-secretly brilliant Javascript style in a rammed-together collection of Prototype, other JS, and JSP. The indenting style is an artefact of having pieced it together in two different editors with different ideas about tabbing. Note in particular the escaped operators - even though it's pretty much unbeatable in every other respect, not even ZZT had that in its repertoire of lunacy.

Comments

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

Geeze, can't you guys get a preprocessor to escape the damn operators?! I'd go insane!

[davidn]

Now that you mention it, I suppose I could just put something in the build process to do it through simple string replacement if it found them on their own - but by this point I've got so used to it that I hardly notice any more.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Hah! What a weird glitch to have happen slightly differently in two different places...

Also, notice how there don't seem to be "ends" to the color change markers, and that it resets on every new line... the last five characters of function doBoxCount() { are brown, even though only the last character of the line should be brown (and the bug drags the colors back by four..) but then, the next line starts its blue color properly. (I'm not sure why I care! I just like seeing how the structure of a program is exposed by its bugs...)

[davidn]

Honestly, I hadn't even noticed that the braces were meant to be a different colour until you mentioned that just now, and even then only when I really zoomed in on the image! The... assumed-blue of the comments and the strings is the only difference to me that's immediately apparent.

I do keep thinking - whenever I'm playing a game or anything - about what the underlying program is thinking at any point, but in the case of Eclipse, this is often anyone's guess.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

All those braces are why I have fallen in love with Python

[davidn]

It gets really good when you want to get an object by an ID that's passed into the page as a parameter, and the syntax is $('${objectName}') just to retrieve it.

It's actually quite a strange thought to me that Python does away with the brace-swarm and semicolons, relying on whitespace instead... I think I'd feel quite lost without them, now.

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

However, the lack of braces and strict indentation rules make long blocks hard to read. This is a design feature I actually approve of.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

...well, not to me, at least

[davidn]

This is what science looks like :)

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

If this is "science", where are the bunsen burners, the flasks of coloured liquids and the row upon row of boxes of frightened mice?