On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 13:03:06 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
ALGOL60 did not have significant whitespace and an offside
rule, just
like C, C++ and D don't, whereas Python, OCaml, etc. do.
I've programmed in OCaml for many years and I somehow missed the
significant whitespace. Even the Revised syntax for OCaml (the
improved and unused one) did not use significant whitespace,
though I recall that there were unloved projects to provide such
a syntax.
C++ has a much nastier syntax than D (IMO of course :-) but the
SPECS proposal for a resyntaxed C++ never caught on. I liked some
of the improvements suggested there, in particular the more
Pascal-ish or Scala-ish declaration syntax, and would have liked
something like that in D, but there are so many more issues to be
fixed that daydreams of improved syntax seem frivolous to me.
