Completely INNOCENT Indentation question

valued customer scooterm at hotmail.com
Thu Oct 14 12:50:28 EDT 2004


> Unfortunately, it's impossible to satisfy "personal preferences" for
> spacing in a language where spacing is a fundamental part of the syntax.
> It's somewhat similar to asking why # could not be used as a comment
> character in C.

Makes sense, although the original post does not ask *why*
such-and-such is
(or is not) possible, but *whether* it is possible. Moreover, just
because
such-and-such is a *fundamental* part of the syntax, it does not
necessarily
follow that it is an *immutable* part of the syntax. 

As you know, some
languages and syntax formats actually *do* allow things like alternate
comment delimters, alternate quotation delimters, and even alternate
methods of specifying INDENT and DEDENT tokens.

Apparently, at least for the latter case, python does not ... which is
all the original question is asking. 

(By the way ... For those curious about "outlining" text editors, 
there are several out there ... just do a web search on "code folding"
to see some examples...)



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