merits of Lisp vs Python

[Christophe]

josephoswaldgg at hotmail.com a écrit :
> Christophe wrote:
>> Call us when you have an editor that reads your mind and writes the ()
>> for you.
> 
> This is an irrelevancy. Typos that drop printing characters in either
> language will generally cause changes to the semantics. Lisp
> programmers, incidentally, will see that their editor indented things
> in a funky way and recognize "hey, I dropped a paren somewhere in that
> copy-paste." (And, if so, it is usually at the end, and can be
> recovered using automatic matching when typing the ')' ). And,
> honestly, the punctuation is no harder to type in Lisp than in other
> languages, they just occur in different (and more consistent) places.
> 
> The point of Python is that changing white-space to
> different-white-space changes the semantics. At best an editor can
> notice "hey, funky white-space here, please correct" as IDLE did when I
> wrote my first Python in a non-Python-aware editor, and somehow had
> swapped tabs and spaces; when I moved it to IDLE---the indentation
> *looked fine* but was invisibly weird. At worst, an editor can go
> "sure, I'll let you change your program."
> 
> I'm not saying the worst case is typical. The annoying case is more
> likely. I will even admit that white-space significance does not
> materially increase errors among experienced Pythonistas. What it isn't
> is some kind of miraculous invention that saves programmers from ever
> making mistakes that are common in other languages, or that reduces
> effort in copy-paste, as Bjoern seemed to be claiming.

So, you are more or less saying that, using a smart Lisp editor, you'll 
easily catch block errors when you misplace a bracket, but using dumb 
Python editors allows inconsistent tab-space usage to go unnoticed?

Yeah, nothing wrong in what you said but hardly relevant I say :)

For the Python side, I just hope that -tt becomes the default option one 
day ( interpreter causes errors when mixing spaces and tabs )