Teaching Programming

[Gary Herron]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 5/3/2010 7:46 PM, cjw wrote:
>
>> Nobody likes indentation at first,
>
> Speak for yourself, please. For two decades before I met Python, I 
> indented code nicely whenever it was allowed. That option was one of 
> the great advancements of Fortran77 over FortranIV. Coming from C, I 
> was immediately glad to be done with those darn braces.
>
> tjr
>

Right.  Somewhere in the 80's I read a paper in sigplan which 
demonstrated that indentation-only was sufficient to communicate the 
structure of a program.    I immediately *knew* that was the right way 
to go.  Sadly, I had to wait a decade or so before discovering Python in 
the mid 90's, but I never forgot that paper nor lost my eager 
anticipation waiting for language design to catch up with that idea.

Gary Herron