"infidel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It just sounds like so much trivial nitpickery that it's hard to > believe it's as common as we've come to believe.
As others have pointed out, these people really do exist, and they each believe their preconception -- that significant whitespace is intrinsically wrong -- is valid, and automatically makes Python a lesser language. One of the most stupid language-definition decisions that most people have come across is the Makefile format. If you're not familiar with it, spaces and tabs are *each* significant. Specifically, putting spaces where a tab is required will result in a file that, while it may be visually identical to a correctly formatted file, doesn't parse correctly. In hindsight it's trivial to predict the needlessly painful learning process that ensues. This is a very painful memory for many programmers, and the general opinion that results is "syntactically significant whitespace is bad". This is the phrase that always gets brought out, and it's often clear that the person hasn't considered *why* it's bad. The issue with the Makefile format (lampooned wonderfully by the Whitespace programming language) is that *invisible* differences in whitespace should not be significant. In a Makefile, you *must* mix spaces and tabs in the same file; this leaves the door wide open to invisible differences. In Python, an admonishment of "always indent each file consistently" suffices. Hope that goes some way to explaining one possible reason why rational people can consistently react in horror to the issue. -- \ "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to | `\ another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one!'" -- | _o__) C.S. Lewis | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list