begin quoting Christopher Smith as of Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 02:07:17PM -0800: > John H. Robinson, IV wrote: [snip] > > I agree Python's approach is wrong. Whitespace should not be > > syntactically significant, outside of separating tokens.
Whitespace is a boolean: "Is there whitespace here?" > > I understand the only two valid arguments: > > 1) If you remove the braces from the different bracing style, you are > > left with Python-mandated indenting. > > 2) There is no question which IF block the ELSE is associated with. > > There is a third valid argument: the eye of the reader tends to > "believe" whitespace is significant; more significant than braces (which > is why people use whitespace in the first place). So, rather than fight > that, let it mean what the eye thinks it means and you improve readability. Except that it *doesn't* improve readability. The eye *believes* whitespace, but it's also not very good at it. It's okay at determining that yeah, verily, there *is* whitespace, but it's not very good at determining how much. For very small programs, that's okay; but these languages are no longer being used solely for small programs. Now, if only three levels of indentation were allowed (none, some, a lot), then sure, the eye would be really good at figuring that out. But is that really the sort of indentation constraint we want to see in a language? > The problem comes from cases where people use a mix of tabs and spaces, > particularly if there are non-standard tab sizes to deal with. Then what > the eye sees and what the compiler see don't match again. There are several problems. That's just one of 'em. -- I could contrive a basic example apace But I'm afraid it won't fit this space Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
