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[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-11-02, Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:

> Ah, but other languages don't make the guarantee that you can add or 
> remove random whitespace in arbitrary places and still have code that
> works correctly!
>
> Of course, neither does Python, but there's a certain type of
> personality that is never happy unless they are bitching and moaning,
> and if they can't find something more substantial to bitch and moan
> about, they'll bitch and moan about the fact that they can't make
> random changes to syntactically significant tokens in their source
> code without things breaking. Boo hoo, cry me a river.

:)

> Personally, I'm more disturbed by the default prompt in the
> interactive interpreter. >>> clashes with the symbol used for quoting
> text in email and news. That causes me far more distress than
> indentation.

I've tripped over that as well.  Not very often, but it's a bigger 
problem than significant whitespace.  I must admit that the first few
minutes I worked with Python having significant whitespace seemed
awkward -- probably because it invoked unpleasant memories of Fortran
IV on punch-cards.

After a short time, I suddenly realized that Python got it right: the
compiler and my brain are using the _same_thing_ to denote program
structure.  All those years of my brain using one thing and the
compiler using a different thing were (and are) obviously the wrong
way to do it.

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