In programming languages every character is just as important as every other character (on average), so each character should get the same amount of space.
...the "!" in the conditional is squished into about 3 pixels, but it has just as much importance as any other character, if not more. Glancing at this code you might not even notice it. In normal text it is also important, but would appear at the end of a sentence, which would be hard to miss...but wedged in there between the "(" and "O" it gets lost.
Another example is trying to line up things. This is sort of a style preference, but sometimes I like doing things like this:
float percent = 0.4f;
int width = 640,
height = 480;
char flag = 'A';
Now, when I typed that the text field was using a monospaced font and everything was lined up perfectly. Chances are, you're viewing it with a variable width font... is it lined up? Not really. (edit: ok in this case multiple whitespace characters are converted to a single point but you get the idea)
What about this:
float percent = 0.4f;
int width = 640,
height = 480;
char flag = 'A';
Much nicer, eh?
Variable width fonts are optimized for readability of free flowing text like books, articles, etc. Code is highly structured, and lining things up and that sort of thing can help the readability.
Can you give me cases where variable width font in code is better?
Sorry to reply so slowly, I read your comment already quite a bit earlier...
So you have these two points, right?
1. Each character is important
2. Lining up things
As a disclaimer, I must say that naturally this is really up to personal taste more than anything.
About 1), I'd say that you are correct, but that depends on the type of thing one is working on. I guess working on some obscure Perl code (that's where I have seen most examples with lots of code that looks like !%&[$tes]) you need to focus much more on single characters than working on for example C++ code with long named variables/function names and mostly calls to them. I am working on the latter, and have found that code like this is easier to read with variable width:
---
TFileName refName;
TXxxYyyInfo* info = iXxx->info->GetPathAndName(refName);
refName.ZeroTerminate();
---
Ok, not too good examples, but maybe you get my point?
2) is something I totally do not care about. I am way too lazy to start lining up anything by hand -- I want my editor to line up my code automatically. And it does a nice job, and I use external tools if I have to work in an environment where I can't select my editor. I don't thins my time should be spent adding spaces.
So to summarize: 1) doesn't seem to matter for me, and if code tends to have many special characters after each other it is probably better to rewrite it for readability anyway. And I don't want to do any lining up by hand anyway.
And descriptive (i.e. quite long) variable names are easier to read with variable width font.
For example, looking at this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/programming-fonts-2-...
...the "!" in the conditional is squished into about 3 pixels, but it has just as much importance as any other character, if not more. Glancing at this code you might not even notice it. In normal text it is also important, but would appear at the end of a sentence, which would be hard to miss...but wedged in there between the "(" and "O" it gets lost.
Another example is trying to line up things. This is sort of a style preference, but sometimes I like doing things like this:
float percent = 0.4f;
int width = 640,
height = 480;
char flag = 'A';
Now, when I typed that the text field was using a monospaced font and everything was lined up perfectly. Chances are, you're viewing it with a variable width font... is it lined up? Not really. (edit: ok in this case multiple whitespace characters are converted to a single point but you get the idea)
What about this:
Much nicer, eh?Variable width fonts are optimized for readability of free flowing text like books, articles, etc. Code is highly structured, and lining things up and that sort of thing can help the readability.
Can you give me cases where variable width font in code is better?