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Date:      Sun, 2 Mar 2003 00:15:31 -0800
From:      "Sean Hamilton" <sh@planetquake.com>
To:        <hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: C coding editor
Message-ID:  <000d01c2e093$e4880910$d1d7e8d8@slugabed.org>
References:  <20030221122103.GA2073@asterix.local> <3E5F85B3.268BD21C@mindspring.com> <20030301231216.GD47955@gothmog.gr> <200303012256.02533.wes@softweyr.com>

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Wes Peters wrote:
| On Saturday 01 March 2003 03:12 pm, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
|| The font of the program text isn't really important, as long as
|| nesting isn't horribly broken by someone who typed the wrong number
|| of spaces instead of just hitting tab.
|
| But the font of the program text *is* important if you are considering
| readability.  We use variable-width fonts for books and printed matter
| because they are easier to read than monospaced fonts.

Er, no. Things like serifs, variable width lettering, and kerning do make
English more readable, but much like they do little good for Japanese, they
are inconvenient for code, which is mostly symbols.

I suppose Pascal would be alright in variable width, but certainly not C. I
tried using variable with for C a while back, and the main problem I had was
not with spacing, but my severely defective ocular receptors were unable to
distingush between a lot of the symbols. IIRC, I went back to monospace
after trying to find the syntax error on a line which wound up ending with a
colon.

sh


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