Re: Code cleanup.

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> At what stage of development (if at all) should such janitorial
>> changes be usually applied?
>
> Code cleanup is usually welcome -- but this is not the time.

Sure.

>> On a completely different tangent: wouldn't it be much more
>> readable (though likely not completely correct in some perverse
>> manner) if diff-mode actually had its TAB positions in column
>> 9,17,25... instead of the customary 8,16,24...?  At least in
>> context and unified diffs, that would _much_ better reflect the
>> relative indentation of the actual change than the current
>> behavior.
>>
>> It does not look like `tab-width' can be made to do that, but maybe
>> one could use a display property in order to move the information
>> of column 0 into the fringe.
>
> Simpler would be to put the "diff decoration" in the left margin and
> put the fringe outside the margins.  Then the user wouldn't see any
> difference (except that tabs line up correctly).

Ah, I forgot the display margins.

>> But it would probably be saner if tab-width were extended to allow,
>> say, a cons-cell of initial offset and tab-width.
>
> Or a list (1 9 17 t)  
> (where t means to repeat tabs every "difference between last two
> elements).

Or a list (8 . #0) for repeated differences of 8, and (9 8 . #1) for
that of 9.  Too bad that this print syntax of
(let ((n (list 9 8))) (setcdr (cdr n) (cdr n)) n)
is not accepted by the Lisp reader.

Circular lists are not really the most natural Lisp constructs...

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum