Re: emacs rendering comparisson between emacs23 and emacs26.3

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > >   > Yes, that is what I meant.  The "kind of things" is nothing more than
  > >   > writing comments in C (etc.) source code.  Sooner or later, such a
  > >   > comment has a parenthesis in it, and sooner or later (e.g. by M-q), this
  > >   > will end up in column 0,
  > >
  > > I am surprised, because that never happens to me.

  > Of course that never happens to you: you're the one who introduced the
  > open-paren-in-column-0 heuristic, so you're clearly biased.

Please focus on the issue not on personalities.  Anyone can be mistaken,
but don't argue that an objective claim is wrong based on who made it.

What matters is whether one can get good results from
open-paren-in-column-0, good enough to make it usable and useful.

I found the open-paren-in-column-0 heuristic satisfactory because in
practice I saw that open-parens did not drift into column zero.  Other
people have said that this does happen to them, and they can't avoid
it.

They, and I, were using the same editor, with the same heuristic, and
getting totally different results.  Why is that?  Surely that is pertinent.
I conjecture it is because of indentation conventions, but if that is not
the reason, what is?

  > > What do you think of such indentation as a solution for this problem.

  > That presumes you have control over the code (and coding conventions).

It presumes that the developers adopt the practice of indenting the
text of block comments, or can be persuaded to do so.

IF my conjecture is correct, open-paren-in-column-0 is useful for
programs where block comments are indented.  Is that conjecture
correct?  How about if we finish comparing notes, and see.

If that is how things are, it should be useful to support
open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start = t rather than make it a no-op.
If the code you edit does not indent block comments, you would
be happier with open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start = nil,
but you don't need that feature to be no-op'ed.

(I did not start indenting the text of block comments because of
the open-paren-in-column-0 heuristic.  I did it because that looks nice.)

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)