Christopher Smith wrote:
> John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
> >
> > Whitespace should not be syntactically significant, outside of
> > separating tokens.
> >
> > I understand the only two valid arguments:
> > 1) If you remove the braces from the different bracing style, you are
> > left with Python-mandated indenting.
> > 2) There is no question which IF block the ELSE is associated with.
> >
> There is a third valid argument: the eye of the reader tends to
> "believe" whitespace is significant; more significant than braces (which
> is why people use whitespace in the first place). So, rather than fight
> that, let it mean what the eye thinks it means and you improve readability.
But you counter that argument later, making this argument invalid.
> The problem comes from cases where people use a mix of tabs and spaces,
> particularly if there are non-standard tab sizes to deal with. Then what
> the eye sees and what the compiler see don't match again.
Exactly why that argument is false. Since the eye cannot see the
difference between a tab and a space, it cannot be differentiated.
If one tab is as wide as eight spaces, and one tab or four spaces make
an indent level, how is the following indented:
level 1
level 2
Someone else brought up the argument that braces and whitespace is
redundant. I agree - it is. If there is a mis-match, then it is obvious
this has to be investigated further. Similarly, tokens in a language are
never as concise as they an be, otherwise we'd all be using ? for
PRINT.
10 ? "HELLO, WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
(GOTO could be optimised as G)
Minimal and optimised instruction set:
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf/
Removal of redundant information must always be evaluated against the
usefulness of the inherent check-summing that it provides.
-john
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