On Sep 18, 2013, at 11:12 AM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote: >> On 2013-09-18, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 12:57 AM, Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote: >>>> There's lots of poetry with significant indentation, though. >>>> Imbuing the shape of the text on the page with significance is a >>>> thing. >>> >>> And you can do that with C code, too. Doesn't mean that >>> indentation is important to C; it means that you're layering >>> different types of information into a single piece of work. >>> It's like Perl code drawn in the shape of a camel - a beautiful >>> hack. >> >> I just meant you can't condense whitespace in a poem and retain >> all its meaning. It will break certain kinds of quotation styles >> in publications, as well. > > Sure. I'm still trying to work out if it's possible to deliver a > verbal speech with fancy information in its written version... English > is a fun language to tinker with! > > ChrisA > -- > Just to add a data point on the importance of formatting in language. New Testament Greek is/was written with no punctuation, no spaces between words, and no distinction between upper and lower case. This frequently results in the Greek equivalent of the follow English: "iamnowhereiameverywhere" which can be "translated" as either "I am now here, I am everywhere." _or_ "I am nowhere, I am everywhere." In other words, two very different meanings. So, without context or further information, the intent of the original writer can't be inferred. -Bill -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list