>>>>> "CY" == C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:
CY> --- Raymond Toy <toy@rtp.ericsson.se> wrote:
>> My own personal feeling is NOT to gratuitously change indentation and
>> what not, especially for large functions, no matter how ugly. Why?
>> When something breaks and you need to find out why, you can't just do
>> a diff between this version and that version, because it will show
>> that everything has changed.
CY> Aren't there options that allow diff to handle this? man diff lists
CY> several options which might be helpful in handling indentation changes:
[snip]
CY> There must be some combination in all that which allows us to do useful
CY> diffs between differently indented files.
CY> In the long term, fixing atrociously bad indentation could help
CY> readibility of the code, if a solution to diffing could be found.
CY> Any diff gurus around who can tell us if such things work? Or maybe
CY> someone has a Maxima file they have made some changes to and indented
CY> for better readibility as a test case?
Yes, I've used these options before and they work.
But if you change
(let ((a 0) (b 1))
...)
to
(let ((a 0)
(b 1))
...)
You need to think harder about what changed.
I'm not saying we should never change the code, but I think it would
make more sense if ALL the code were reindented at once, more or
less. Perhaps the case-change in the 5.9.2 release would be a good
time to do this. Then we KNOW nothing else has changed.
Ray