Re: ChangeLog fontifications

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 11:37:55PM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> This ChangeLog style is a typographic nightmare IMHO.

On the contrary, it looks quite nice.  IMO.

In fact I find it more readable than the `traditional' format, as it provides
the same advantage for the human reader that it does for a parser: it makes
the type of a line obviously identifiable by looking for a token in the left
margin, where it's very easy to see.

[The alternative format you suggest, `(a)(b)(c)' does not provide any real
advantage for the reader -- embedded ") (" pairs are in fact _harder_ to
parse for a human than commas because they're busier, and less familiar.]

> What on earth was the reason to invent such a convention?

Because (1) it's more friendly to line-oriented parsers (like font-lock, but
also external tools [*]), and (2) it looks quite nice.

[*] Indeed, rather _more_ important for external tools, because many unix
scripting languages &c are quite line-oriented, more so that emacs is.

-Miles
-- 
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it
has to be us.  -- Jerry Garcia