tabs do WHAT?

Thomas Hamelryck thamelry at vub.ac.be
Thu Jan 27 07:09:54 EST 2000


[Thomas Hamelryck  <thamelry at vub.ac.be>]
: But many languages have evolved exactly this way: users criticize,
: complain, praize and whine, thereby influencing the shape of the
: languge in question.

[Doug Landauer <landauer at apple.com>]
: Yes, this works well in many cases, including Python.  Notice that
: it is, for the most part, *non*-users of python who complain about
: the indentation.  _Users_, for the most part, like it.  Languages
: that change by catering to the tastes of non-users tend not to do
: so well.

I agree that most users of python seem to like the strict indentation rule.
I seem to be one of the few actual python users who do not like it. The
complaints about the indentation do not really come from *non*-users of python.
Rather, they come from people who have gotten interested in python for some
reason or another and are completely turned down by the idiosyncratic use of
syntactically significant whitespace and/or tabs. So python is missing a lot
of potential momentum beacuse of the indentation stuff. I find this a pity.

Still a great language though. 

Cheers,

---
Thomas Hamelryck    Institute of Molecular and Structural Biology
Aarhus University   Gustav Wieds Vej 10C
DK-8000 Aarhus C    Denmark                                                                        



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