Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > I'm talking about how people, those bags of flesh and thoughts, are > bugged out by the notion that *whitespace* should matter (other than > the mere presence/absence of it). It's the price you pay for being > different - people will have trouble comprehending you.
To be fair, there is good reason for the programming (and broader IT) community to have a heuristic of “significant whitespace is probably bad”. The few languages that did this badly (Makefile syntax, some Unix shell syntax) leave a legacy of countless headaches and you can't fix the language retroactively without breaking backward compatibility. 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. Those people who claim to have tried Python and *still* complain about “significant whitespace”, I have no sympathy for. Python clearly does it right, and it's a huge boon to readability and reducing simple errors. -- \ “He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or | `\ cut a throat.” —“Lord” George Gordon Noel Byron, _Don Juan_ | _o__) | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
