Significant whitespace

Alexander Schmolck a.schmolck at gmx.net
Wed Oct 8 16:14:15 EDT 2003


Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:

> Moral: Haskell and Python happen to succeed with significant indents
> but their rules are hard to adapt to other languages. Significant
> indentation constrains the syntax - if you like these constraints, fine,
> but it would hurt if a language were incompatible with these constraints.

I'm not surprised -- as I said it is not straighforward to map the significant
indentation scheme to a language that doesn't have python(C/Pascal)'s
statement/expression distinction. My main point is that it is an excellent
choice for a language such as python (and far superior to the alternatives a
la Pascal/C). 

I'm not whitespace bigot: although I abhor C/Pascal I like the syntaxes of
smalltalk, prolog and lisp (maybe I could even partially warm to something in
the APL familiy) :)

'as




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