&quot;Amazingly, surprisingly, counterintuitively, the indentation problem is almost <i>totally orthogonal</i> to parsing and syntax validation. I&#x27;d never have guessed it. But for indentation you care about totally different things that don&#x27;t matter at all to parsers. Say you have a JavaScript argument list: it&#x27;s just (blah, blah, blah): a paren-delimited, comma-separated, possibly empty list of identifiers. Parsing that is pretty easy. But for indentation purposes, that list is rife with possibility!&quot; -- Steve Yegge, 2008 [1]<p>That really struck me back then, and I&#x27;ve kept it in mind whenever I hear about code beautifying&#x2F;indenting.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;03&#x2F;js2-mode-new-javascript-mode-for-emacs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;03&#x2F;js2-mode-new-javascr...</a>