[Bluej-discuss] bluej-discuss Digest, Vol 52, Issue 12

[Aryeh M. Friedman]

Lon Levy wrote:
> May I suggest that you were learning Scheme with the purpose of learning a language ... not the way my students learn.  The concepts are trivial if approached correctly.  Also, neither I nor my students spend time counting parenthesis; this is one of the appropriate uses of an IDE.  Just like BlueJ, the DrScheme IDE does parenthesis matching for the programmer or student.  If we still lived in the world of writing Scheme in vi or e-macs, I would run away in terror.
>   

There is just something inherently wrong with a lang that requires an
IDE in my mind... there is also a fantastic language call APL or worse
one where all the reserved words are white space (yes such a lang does
exist)... now with that being said this goes all the way back to the mid
60's with the divide between Bell Labs and MIT on various aspects of
Multics (MIT wanted theoretical purity [LISP] and Bell Labs wanted
something praciticle [C/C++/Java]) who is right and who is wrong is
largely a religious and background debate (except for some of the
semantic and syntactical issues mentioned in this thread) and since my
background is hardcore UNIX systems coding my choice in the debate is
clear.
> This discussion led from questions of what should be in an IDE and since it is the BlueJ group, may I shift to there for a moment.  BlueJ does parenthesis matching, as I mentioned above.  This is a good thing.  One thing that I would prefer (not required) is a bolder indication of the match.  The outline of the parenthesis on both ends works, but is sometimes difficult for my tired old eyes to see.
>   

I have not done so but I have seen prof's reject non-perfectly indented
code for just this reason.