Ohnoes significant whitespace

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au>:

> So I am sympathetic to Python newcomers recoiling in horror from
> significant whitespace, *before* they try it. And because of that, we
> are burdened with forever needing to deal with that reaction and
> soothing it.

I remember being *very* doubtful how the whitespace would work in
practice. I was won over by a colleague who had sloppy indentation
habbits in C++ but produced tidy, readable code in Python.

> Those people who claim to have tried Python and *still* complain about
> “significant whitespace”,

I am bitten by it occasionally. The editor doesn't know from the context
how a line or block should be (re)indented. In Emacs, TAB, BS and C-M-\,
which keep source code properly indented in other programming languages,
have been known to lead to accidental bugs in Python code. (The proper
way in Emacs is to use C-> and C-< to manipulate blocks of Python code.)

> I have no sympathy for. Python clearly does it right, and it's a huge
> boon to readability and reducing simple errors.

I don't mind Python's syntax. It's the implicit semicolons of JavaScript
and Go that I dislike.


Marko