Indentation/whitespace

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 15:31:55 -0800, thakadu wrote:

> I consider myself a fairly experienced Python coder and although I am
> not "uncomfortable" with significant whitespace there are a few places
> where I do find it annoying and I wouldnt mind an alternate block
> delimitation syntax.  I would prefer something like the ruby "end"
> though rather than '{' and '}'. 

Python already has support for begin/end if you want it. It is spelt
"# BEGIN" and "# END" (or "#END IF", etc.), and is case-insensitive.

In most programming languages, begin/end markers are syntactically
significant while indentation is recommended but not enforced by the
compiler. In Python, it is the other way around.


> The place I find it annoying is in
> pasting snippets of code from say web pages. I very often google for a
> piece of code and then paste it into my editor and almost always the
> pasted piece of code has different indentation and causes a compiler
> error. 

That's hardly Python's fault. That's a problem with lousy browsers,
editors etc. which add word-wrapping or remove whitespace. Complain to the
browser developers.



-- 
Steven.