Re: BEGIN_SRC..END_SRC

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
> On Sat, 05 May 2012 16:38:49 -0500 John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote: 
> JW> Why not just indent code blocks with space, the way that
> JW> Markdown does?  It's readable to all parties.
>
> It makes copy+paste harder, especially with embedded newlines, and
> you can't specify the language[1].  JIRA's {code:LANGUAGE} and
> {code} markers are much more sensible.

Still, as something to aid human comprehension -- which is presumably
the main intent (even if not the only one) -- the indented form seems
much better...

I don't really buy the copy-paste argument.  For inserting code into a
message, none of these methods is effort-free; you either intent the
code, or insert some magic strings around it (indenting is probably
easier, at least in Emacs, unless there are special commands to deal
with the situation, in which case all methods are equal).  For
extracting code into a file to test or something, indented code _may_
be more problematic, if indentation is significant (bad Python, bad!),
but in the majority of cases, I think it isn't -- e.g. it's usually
fine to compile a C program where every line has 4 spaces added...

-miles

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