>maybe i've been writing lisp too long, and i've even come to trust my text
>editor's ability to balance parens, but even before the days of emacs and co.,
>reading (and indenting, if need be) for balancing became second nature.
>i won't repeat paul graham's argument from "on lisp" here, but it came down to
>"you end up reading shapes, not parentheses. if you get to need to count the
>parentheses, the cause is lost anyway..."
>besides, the editors i've seen for c and java these days not only blink
>braces, they even display them in pretty colors.
>shouldn't one expect the same of xml editors - to the extent that they're not wysiwyg?
Wouldn't that be nice! Of course, asking an editor to balance based
on string comparison of the tag names isn't quite as easy as matching
parens... Too bad XML was defined like this:
<mytag> ... </mytag>
instead of this:
<<mytag> ... >
or even this:
<<mytag> ... </mytag>>
which would work with every programming editor around, right now...
<g,d&r/>
--Jeremy H. Griffith <jeremy@omsys.com>
http://www.omsys.com/jeremy/