True, I'm not saying we should do it since not everybody would follow and it would just cause more pain. But if everybody would then I think it would work better than the current approach.
I still indent my code (obviously) and follow language style guides because if I everybody did what they thought was best every code base would be a complete mess.
Most text editors have this understanding anyway. That's how they autoindent code or colour keywords and variables. Yeah I guess I'm just proposing a different common format but in the end I believe it to be slightly better since it solves a few problems.
No, I don't think this will ever happen and it would cause a lot of pain to transition to it. But I just think it's an interesting idea which could have worked had it been done like this from the beginning.
Well that's the point really. Nobody would be looking at unindented code. The point of my post is that the only reason for indentation is visualisation purposes. It's not there to be read by the machine (except for in Python) and is not a description of what is being done.
Just as we leave other visualisation to the editor such as colouring variables, all I'm asking is why not follow the same approach when it comes to indentation?
I still indent my code (obviously) and follow language style guides because if I everybody did what they thought was best every code base would be a complete mess.