On Aug 18, 2:22 pm, "Aaron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello all. > > I realize that proposals dealing with alternatives to indentation have been > brought up (and shot down) before, but I would like to take another stab at > it, because it is rather important to me. > > I am totally blind, and somewhat new to Python. I put off learning Python > for a long time, simply because of the indentation issue. There is no easy > way for a screenreader user, such as my self, to figure out how much a > particular line of code is indented. A sited person simply looks down the > column to make sure that everything lines up. I, on the other hand, > generally find my self counting a lot of spaces. <snip>
Very interesting 'reading' code verbally. I would think this would be far less efficient than using a braille line display, especially if there were a multi-line display which I'm not sure exists (but should). Anyway, as someone who is a very fond of python's use of indentation for flow control, I also see that it is not always appropriate for EVERY form of computing I'd like to apply python too and I wish there were an alternative control flow form which was considered valid in all respects but frowned upon when not used in the exception cases intended. Also it should be a form in which a parser could easily convert back and forth from at ease so you could code in one format and deploy in another. Besides your excellent example, the context that I have in mind is embedded python running in a web browser ala javascript. You absolutely cannot count on whitespace when your code is going through the parser/converter gauntlet that the typical html page must go through before being delivered to its requestor. As a student of language design I find javascript an abomination and have long wondered whether or not this dependency on whitespace hasn't taken python out of the running from being a very popular and appropriate contender. (I realize that the restricted execution environment of old python was abandoned but maybe browser python is a strict subset?) I really am not at the point of making this a proposal. Really I'm just curious as to whether or not I'm the only person who thinks this and would like to see if the concept has any traction. This is no low impact concept so I'm not holding my breath. I will say, however, that the web browser would be a far more pleasant development environment if it spoke python rather than javascript. I feel strongly that its the best internet service language (wonderful std libs) and its OO and functional paradigm would play nicely in a browser environment. I have python on all my computers regardless of operating system and cpu. I have python embedded in C++ apps and C++ apps embedded in python. Python runs on my phone! Python runs on the JVM and the CLR. Python runs everywhere - except my browser. ...just dreaming... -- Ben -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list