Whitespace delimiters suck

[Fredrik Lundh]

Roy Smith <roy at popmail.med.nyu.edu> wrote:
> When I was first learning programming (a quarter of a century ago!), 
> there was the idea of the "telephone test", i.e. your code should be 
> simple enough that if you read it to somebody on the phone they would 
> understand it.

hey, who the heck is reading code over the phone
these days?

> Python not only fails the phone test, it fails the printed page
> test; I can print two programs on a piece of paper, which 
> differ only in tabs and spaces, and they will appear identical
> yet which do different things.  Barf.

doesn't that mean that if you type them in again,
they may or may not work? ;-)

</F>

<!-- (the eff-bot guide to) the standard python library:
http://www.pythonware.com/people/fredrik/librarybook.htm
— see it live on the python conference! &smiley; -->