Yes, the point about metaprogramming is a good one.
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 4:03 PM, Steven G. Johnson <[email protected]>wrote: > It's a tradeoff. The cost of having an explicit "end" is a few extra > characters that you have to type, and an extra line of code at the end of > each block. On the other hand, the benefits include less error-prone > cut-and-paste (as Stefan mentioned), the possibility of automated > reformatting of code (e.g. think emacs indent-region or gofmt), and > flexibility in writing one-liners (e.g. "try foo() end"). > > I think the metaprogramming facilities in Julia also favor the choice of > explicit block delimiters. In Julia, code can also be a symbolic > expression, simply by surrounding it with :(....) or quote ... end, and > whitespace sensitivity within symbolic expressions seems like it would get > annoying quickly > > Probably this should be in the Julia FAQ or Manual, since our inexplicable > rejection of the holy whitespace seems to be the first thing that every > Python programmer asks about. (If you hate typing extraneous characters, > the colons in Python must drive you bonkers.) > > (People who like maximum terseness in a practical programming language > should take a look at J. The J examples on > RosettaCode<http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:J>are pretty amazing.) >
