Re:How I Switched to Plan 9
by notduncansmith on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:00AM
(#21710494)
> viewing the source of a program as a linear page of text doesn't make much sense.
I don’t think we really view a file of source code as a linear page of text though, right? It’s a tree. Sibling nodes are often laid out either horizontally or vertically, and children are often wrapped in some type of brace and/or indented, maybe delimited.
I think the fact that editors usually a) align the textual boundaries of tree nodes, and b) allow syntactically/semantically-invalid states, sometimes gets people thinking about editing a character stream instead of a semantic tree.
I don’t think we really view a file of source code as a linear page of text though, right? It’s a tree. Sibling nodes are often laid out either horizontally or vertically, and children are often wrapped in some type of brace and/or indented, maybe delimited.
I think the fact that editors usually a) align the textual boundaries of tree nodes, and b) allow syntactically/semantically-invalid states, sometimes gets people thinking about editing a character stream instead of a semantic tree.