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Comment by lucasyvas | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. Indentation is a visual concern for humans and braces are a semantic concern for a machine. Code only needs the latter to actually execute.

You can prefer them be coupled for taste reasons but they are fundamentally different. Code minification is a practical example where you can save many characters by omitting whitespace.

This is like tabs vs spaces. The white spaces crowd prefer the trade offs, and the tab crowd don't. But the white space crowd can't argue the perks of tabs - they exist.

disclaimer: Am braces/whitespace camp.

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The tabs/spaces war was fought because of IDE choices that restricted your ability for sane tab rendering defaults, and simple overriding of tab size.

Now that terrible text editors won, I have to watch a 2 Vs 4 space war.

If only we could have a character that could represent indentation and people could set the rendering so they can visualise it in their own preferred way.

And folks who want to remove braces should be pointed to the Apple certificate snafu.

if only whitespace was treated as such visually, and the IDE would serialize to whatever the repository uses, and similarly for YAML-JSON.

> Now that terrible text editors won

yes. but not all hope is lost, maybe AGI helps/wipes us out!

Considering that we lost tabs because some peoples text editors and web browsers rendered them as 8 spaces, and drew the wrong conclusion, I don't have much hope for your plan.

However I would be completely on board if we could agree on a formatting configuration file that people could check into a repo for IDEs to pick up.

I think we've mostly agreed on editorconfig[1], though it doesn't concern itself with language-specific formatting - it's even built into a lot of editors.

For language-specific formatting, you can run formatters in pre-commit-hooks and CI. Treefmt[2] can help with that if you want to cover a lot of languages in your repo.

1. https://editorconfig.org/

2. https://github.com/numtide/treefmt

I'll have to check out EditorConfig.

It looks like IntelliJ supports it, so that could cut down on the amount of work required to get it in a project.

But you see that indentation is always written in the source plaintext, together with the braces, right?

100%

I see it, I understand the argument for coupling them. But the argument makes an assumption I am not comfortable with - it says they are there for the same exact same reason, which is not actually true. It is often incidentally true in practice depending on the needs of the language - but it is not universally true across all needs in all languages.

It's the same thing with semi-colons. Having a statement separator provides practical benefits in several languages. In many of these languages, they are also optional.

If you were to say that all languages should parse both styles to get the best of both worlds, that wouldn't be completely unreasonable. But it makes the parsing more complex than necessary to support both, so only one is often supported - which is fair.

That's not true, the argument does not "say they are there for the same exact reason", that's your strawman. The argument is just: "they always come together thus one is redundant and we obviously can't remove indentation". The difference in reason, syntax/compiler vs. legibility, is irrelevant.

I mean, you can argue for having both for a myriad of reasons. It's redundant and no big deal, a lot of languages do just that. And some languages do fine with only indentation and no braces. But there is no language that does braces without indentation, or at least stylewise the code is always indented.

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