[Lazarus] Auto indentation

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Jürgen Hestermann schrieb:

>>> And that's something *I* don't like. You never know which END belongs 
>>> to wheach BEGIN. I always column align all ENDs to their 
>>> corresponding BEGINs.
>> You missed the second part of my argumentation. I'm thinking in the 
>> superior Modula syntax, that does not require begin-end pairs around 
>> statement sequences.
> 
> I am not sure why you mention the Modula syntax. I thought we are 
> talking about Pascal here. And Pascal requires the begin-end pairs 
> (unless it is a single statement). And there is a logic behind it. I 
> always see directly which block is related to the IF (WHILE, REPEAT, 
> ...) statement:
> 
> -----------------
> if a then
>    begin
>    xxxxxx;
>    yyyyyy;
>    ....
>    zzzzzz;
>    end;
> aaaaa;
> bbbbb;
> ccccc;
> -----------------
> 
> -----------------
> if a then
>    xxxxxx;
> aaaaa;
> bbbbb;
> ccccc;
> -----------------

The indentation allows to identify the block ranges, without any optical 
special search for BEGIN and END keywords - only the *formatter* must 
deal with the concrete syntax.

> And if the statement or block is very short I can put the whole on one 
> line:
> 
> -----------------
> if a then begin xxxxxx yyyyyy .... zzzzzz end;

That's questionable practice. It's impossible to set an breakpoint into 
the body of the conditional statement.


> I *never* put deeper level commands/blocks on the same column (including 
> BEGIN/END) and I *always* align the BEGIN/ENDs.

I align the *lines*, *containing* BEGIN/ENDs ;-)

> The BEGIN/ENDs delimit 
> the block and are part of it so IMO they should be treated the same as 
> all other commands of the block and be aligned with them.

There exist substancially different opinions about the alignment of 
BEGIN/ENDs - should they align with their parent statement or be 
indented, and should their content be aligned or indented. As long as 
the extra-line blockers <g> cannot agree about the one and only 
acceptable solution, I feel free to ignore that debate and move the 
block delimiters to the next best place, saving one or more lines in my 
code with every single block.

DoDi