A 'Python like' language

[Stephen Horne]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 13:53:45 -0500, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:

>"John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:
>> Yes, especially since they didn't learn their lessons about
>> tab as an indentation character. That means that I can't send
>> a Prothon program (or snippet from one) using Outlook
>> Express, which automaticlly strips tabs from the front of
>> lines, thus destroying the indentation.
>
>Are you objecting specifically to the use of the tab character for 
>indenting, or to the use of white space for statement grouping in 
>general?

I don't know about David, but I know that I specifically dislike the
use of the tab character. The *real* evil happens when people mix tabs
and spaces for indentation, but I always preferred to use spaces
rather than tabs.

Different people have different tab sizes set up in their editors. As
long as you don't mix tabs and spaces, the indentation itself will be
clear - but having a different tab size can break other aspects of
vertical alignment, damaging readability in other ways. It isn't as
bad as the problems that arise when mixing tabs and spaces for
indentation, but IMO it is bad enough.

Reading (and maintaining consistency with) someone elses preferred
indent size isn't really a hassle. Compared with dealing with tab size
issues, IMO it's by far the least hassle. And of course any decent
editor can convert tab keypresses to equivalent numbers of spaces as
you type.


On a separate issue, the Prothon developers seem to have the mistaken
view that commas influence line continuation in Python. They don't -
but parentheses, square brackets and braces do. Though the Prothon
extra-indentation system (which is similar to Haskells offside rule, I
suppose) is an interesting idea.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk