Steven E. Harris wrote:
That's not variation in whitespace, it's variation in expression
boundaries. We do the same thing with our (Western) written languages:
letters, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Would you say that
our written language is "sensitive to whitespace" because the
following mean something different?
catalog
cat a log
Um, absolutely.
C programs can be smashed onto one line (most of the time) with almost
no change in semantics or tokenizing. C isn't insensitive to it (as I
showed ... "a = *x/*y;" is another nice one), but normally it is the
case. Tokens parse the same; separators stay the same; the meaning
stays the same. Unfortunately, in programming languages, things have to
*always* be true in order to take advantage of them because computers
have the intelligence of a box of rocks.
In English, on the other hand, if sentences are smashed together without
whitespace, you can get complete meaning changes. Part of it is
inherent ambiguity: "Eats shoots and leaves" has ambiguity in spoken
language without context--"to ward" is different from "toward" in
written language without context.
"Whitespace" == "word separator" in English. It's really important.
Even *with* whitespace, somoething like "Eats shoots and leaves" is
ambiguous without punctuation.
An interesting aside for those learning Japanese. Learn Kanji; don't
try to "just" learn Kana. Even Japanese natives have trouble reading
Kana-only, it's like reading English without whitespace. The Kanji
often serve as word separators in written Japanese.
-a
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