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Forum comments in chronological order

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for what people (other than myself) write in the forums. Please report any abuse, such as insults, slander, spam and illegal material, and I will take appropriate actions. Don't feed the trolls.

Jag tar inget ansvar för det som skrivs i forumet, förutom mina egna inlägg. Vänligen rapportera alla inlägg som bryter mot reglerna, så ska jag se vad jag kan göra. Som regelbrott räknas till exempel förolämpningar, förtal, spam och olagligt material. Mata inte trålarna.

Oct 2020

Kernighan's lever

Anonymous
Thu 1-Oct-2020 23:55
Wow this page is used in our university programming course.

A case against syntax highlighting

Astara
Astara
Wed 7-Oct-2020 15:52
Issues with your black & white view of syntax coloring:
* "do you rely on syntax highlighting?" Loaded question.

I learned programming long before color terminals, so it is obvious that I don't rely on it, but I do use syntax highlighting and prefer working with a color scheme, usually of my own design.

When you are _writing_ code, you are converting from design (content) to a semantic+syntactic form that communicates your idea to the computer. You might as well ask if you rely on ascii text to program rather than programming in binary.

At the point of writing, your first job is to create a syntactically valid representation of your content, followed by a semantically valid format. The color significantly aids in writing syntactically valid code, and to a lesser extent, semantically valid code. It doesn't help create content, but aids in weeding out mistakes in converting from 'design' or content to some format the machine will understand.

That's it and that's why it was created -- it may be used for other things but its primary benefit is in ensuring your syntactic and semantic translation is valid.

It immediately helps weed out many errors that would otherwise require at least, one roundtrip through the compiler (perhaps many depending on the compiler and how well it recovers from errors and can continue useful notations for other problems.

Then you go into created situations where color can get in the way. In regards to that, if you don't intimately know the coloring scheme, it will just be noise.

You compare code which has strict syntactic and semantic rules with written language which is very lax and has never been written primarily for the benefit of a computer need to understand and parse the code. For that matter, the computer usually won't see the coloring -- so it color is usually not written to help comprehension except in teaching situations.

Syntax highlighting is ONLY meant for experienced programmers who know its meaning and place. Newbies won't know your color scheme, neither will other those trying to read it.


If syntax highlighting doesn't help you in writing code. Don't use it.

If your eyes automatically detect a mismatched number of syntax elements, you don't need it. But few people have that talent, anymore than they have the talent to program in binary.

They rely on crutches to speed up translation into machine code.

FWIW, looking at code in a foreign color scheme can be disconcerting as well as slowing someone else down.

That's why you really need to find your own color style that assists you.

The same can be said for code format, spaces v. tabs, and using invisible characters vs. brackets as syntax elements.

Thinking that 1 format is best for everyone is simply naive. Forcing an unfamiliar format on someone will lower their productivity and increase errors in the code as they are constantly needing to devote some part of their brain to translate into a foreign format.

Of note -- those who don't understand and speak your own language, natively, often are are perceived as less intelligent (a bit more slow) -- because their brain always has to devote some of its bandwidth to translation.

So the best coding method is one that can be adjusted to the programmers own style -- *programatically*.

Cheers!

Craft

Anonymous
Tue 13-Oct-2020 03:01
the author should have drawn schematic more legibily using some circuit drawing software instead of this lousy ascii patterns

arun -
India
This minimalistic way of drawing goes with the minimal 'computer' approach. personnaly, I've really liked this ascii art. This a one more proof that the design is minimal AND powerful.
Anonymous
Tue 13-Oct-2020 03:45
This is really incredible !
Most impressive is .. 1K of ram. Not enough for a video buffer.
Amazing work !

The Å-machine

triangel3532
marcel schleier
Tue 13-Oct-2020 18:00
mmmmhhh... outaphonY?
noprob<=0> useaolskoolasthaisnonototherSCHOOLY, BABY!

bum.mmmmBum-bUkKmMmM...bum-di-didi-duDUM ...öööhhmmm: PENG? YEP: PENG<!

ok?

texzZdrum/triangle3532

The TTY demystified

Anonymous
Tue 13-Oct-2020 22:11
is this troll ..vik

A case against syntax highlighting

ingvar
Fri 16-Oct-2020 17:37

lft wrote:

My opinion is that having one person's lines printed in a different colour would distract the reader from everything else in the book. However, it is not equivalent to syntax highlighting, because it doesn't emphasize information that is already there syntactically. It would be a case of semantic highlighting, and in most cases a completely useless one, although there might be cases where it clarifies who is speaking. The same effect is used by Terry Pratchett in the Discworld novels, where Death speaks in small capital letters.

Not only using smallcaps, but also (IIRC, and it's been a while since I referenced the source material) without speech markers, thus conveying the fact that Death doesn't so much speak, as eality shapes itself so that Death has spoken.

Dialog

Anonymous
Thu 22-Oct-2020 10:37
Is there any plans for a swedish translation of the library?

Autosokoban

Anonymous
Mon 26-Oct-2020 00:03
The world NEED Autosokoban as an app. Every good thing must last forever!
(ClockworkBastard)

Dialog

lft
Linus Åkesson
Tue 27-Oct-2020 14:35
Is there any plans for a swedish translation of the library?

Not at the moment, because I don't want to lock down the design of the library too early, and I don't want to coordinate major design changes across multiple versions.

But feel free to make a translation of the current version, if you like! And make sure to check out the German library by Mikawa.

The Symbolic Links Virtual Machine

Anonymous
Tue 27-Oct-2020 18:59
Can you edit the sorce code to modify the b/s number correctly?

About me

Anonymous
Sat 31-Oct-2020 17:35
hey linus... how are you? miss you!
if ya send me your adress... micha@fischfieber.info
than can i send you me little package. it is about futuresound and saving the world and stuff, you know!
would send you mobilnumber, too
mean, if you maybe want to have it?
...than we could talk. i would be happy to talk to you!
how about you?
michael