[ESS] Ever consider changing indentation on #?

[Stephen Eglen]

hi Paul,

> "what the Hell, the folding is borked!". This is more and more common
> with the adoption of markdown-style commentary within R files.

can you give an example of the markdown-style commentary?


> Until now, I've said "too bad" when they complain about their code,
> but now I'm thinking we ought to consider changing the behavior of
> Emacs/ESS.  Does it really really need to do # indentation that way?
> Why?  I've always thought it is odd. And counterintuitive. In what
> backwards world would one suppose # gets the most indent, while ###
> gets none?. I don't see any benefit in that # indentation that way. I
> do see a big benefit in the ## indent at the code level. I'm only
> quibbling about #.

just for background context, ESS follows the Emacs convention for
comments (### for column 0, ## for same level, # for col 32 or more), that is
used widely in elisp.  It is probably fair to say though that these
conventions are not widely known outside of Emacs.

> Would you ever consider changing the ESS default for R files so # is
> flush left?  Could I offer you some cash to consider it?
>
> I understand I *could* learn code for my emacs.init to do that, but it
> seems like a change that would be broadly beneficial to new Emacs &
> ESS users.  I preach the message about Emacs to the students here, but
> little quirks like this seem like an unnecessary hassle.

Its likely to be fixable, but first it might be worth hearing Martin's
views on this, as he may deal with differing commenting styles a lot in
R-core.

Stephen