Thread: [code] coloring breaks [color]

Originally Posted by quzah

The version they have (had?) in place now with [code] does line numbering, and you can even click-drag-copy-paste and it won't add the line numbers. It's pretty nice (except for having to shift+reload to get it to show up) except for the color choices.


Quzah.

I wasn't sure,I didn't get too much of a chance to play around with it before it was suspended.
:insertrandomjoketobumpmypostcount:

I like the idea to mandate indentation as part of the rules. This is not something we should be babysitting; it is something those who want help have to learn and do right.

If it's hard to read, it's not going to get read. It's not my job to make sure you give me something good to read. If you want it read, make it readable.


Quzah.

Originally Posted by VirtualAce

Indeed which is why my personal policy is no indentation = no help. Everytime I try to go in and add indentation to a post that has none I end up making it worse than before.

That is usually because of the "white space disaster" phenomenon. Something that an auto formatter, if added, would alleviate and allow us to work on the code. Heck, sometimes having the OP just see their code formatted the right way might be enough to allow them to solve their own problems.

Originally Posted by AndrewHunter

That is usually because of the "white space disaster" phenomenon. Something that an auto formatter, if added, would alleviate and allow us to work on the code.

I like syntax highlighting and it is a very concrete thing to do, but I think whitespace formatting is more problematic and expensive. Whitespace is mostly irrelevant to parsers/compilers, except in places where very strict rules have replaced braces with tabs (python), and C/C++ is not one of those.

I have no problem with syntax highlighting my code but I do not want to see it auto formatted beyond that. People can and should do that for themselves and if not it is very easy to point out, easier even than simple syntax errors.

2) Adding an option to disable the highlighting for users who don't want it. Either a per-code-box button or a user setting.

Ah! Thank you.

Originally Posted by webmaster

3) automatically pick up the right kind of brush from the forum URL (right now it's also C++, but it should be possible to properly color C# and C)

I wonder if it is better to default to just line numbering, then highlight syntax according to language if specified, e.g.,
[code=c++]#include <iostream>
// ...[/code]

This is indeed a programmers forum, webmaster. Is it that important the code coloring mechanism works for the layman, or -- even stranger -- works for older posts? I think anyone in the process of learning a programming language (since I don't expect folks come here to learn about tupperware) will pick up on manual code highlighting just fine. It's not really that big of a brain cell investment. Especially if you make a point of adding some help text on the new post screen. Make them earn their programmer stripes; know what I mean?... No?

My personal experience always told me that there's a divide between easier things and things that work. I'm just not sure you can effectively reconcile code coloring for the newb with code coloring that just works. How do you plan to handle the Tech board, or Windows Programming board, or Linux Programming board, or Game Programming board, et cetera? I'd rather have code coloring that works.

I'm not sure how you enable the new color syntax highlighting, but it doesn't know how to handle multi-line quotes for broken strings. See this: Need help with errors

The bottom prinf statements should actually look like this:

Code:

printf( "hello "%d", foo );
printf( "world "%d", bar );
... and so on

Quzah.

Originally Posted by quzah

The bottom prinf statements should actually look like this:

I do not think so. The second line printf should not be highlighted as a string literal because it is not part of a string literal since there is no \ line continuation. Whether the broken string literal on the first line should be highlighted... I am not so sure if it matters. Highlighting it makes sense because it is at least the start of a string literal, yet not highlighting it might make the mistake more obvious (or perhaps not).

Well even if we go by not splitting lines, you still would end up with:

printf("Number of 50 cents "%d", fifty);

Or they should change the string color so it is not as close to black as it is, so that it is clearly obvious that your strings are broken.


Quzah.