Obsession with layout and syntactic trivia

[Dick Dunn]

>> For heaven's sake, isn't there something more interesting to talk
>> about?
>
>Hell, yes.  *Anything* would be more interesting to talk about than
>religious arguments about the "right" place to put tokens on "paper".

Agree also - but here's a meta-point:  The fascination with "where to put
the tokens on paper" has flooded another medium in the past - good old
SIGPLAN Notices.  The editor (Richard Wexelblat, out there somewhere) made
an exception to the general rule of printing anything which is civil and
relevant - in January 84 he announced that he would print no more articles
on prettyprinting.  What had happened (my personal viewpoint) is that
people had started using SIGPLAN as a means to get something in print - and
you can almost always find some reason to disagree with someone else's
conventions.  We saw a flood of articles on how to format (mostly Pascal
and Pascal-like-language) programs, most of which were crap that reduced to
"My way is better because I like it so I do it my way."  The most amazing
fact about the whole thing was not Wexelblat's action but the fact that
there wasn't a flood of letters saying "let's cut the crap and get back to
real work."
-- 
...A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.		Dick Dunn
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