Re: [Readable-discuss] Proposal: "Most consistent" interpretation for leading horizontal whitespace

[Egil Möller]

Title: FreeCode Signature

Heyas again! If I understand this correctly, it unfortunately breaks the following code: foo bar fie ; some comment muae naja hehe The code is supposed to mean (foo bar fie muae (naja hehe))... Except for the blank line, this would work just fine. I had a separate proposed rule saying that "whitespace-only lines = line with no whitespace", I'll presume that's what you're commenting on. Yes, that's it. Yes, that's a downside of that proposal. On the other hand, your example might ALSO have the same interpretation - there's no way to tell the difference, because the difference is in the amount of whitespace on a line. I think that paying to attention to indentation on whitespace-only lines is a long series of hairy bugs waiting to happen. I don't think anyone wants to debug by checking WHITESPACE on blank lines. I sure don't, I make enough mistakes already :-). That's why I'd rather have the system ignore empty lines/lines with only space all together. I think there's an easy workaround that makes this useable; if you want vertical space, just use a ";" character and nothing else. Like this: foo bar fie ; ; some comment muae naja hehe But this adds a rather big disadvantage - that you have to care about the indentation of comments! You can not any longer write foo bar fie bar naja ;; FIXME hehe muae ; some comment that's to long to fit in the small space to the right mumu ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; SOME SPACER ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; naja hehe Which sometimes makes an awful lot of sense, esp. the FIXME-part... Another option I didn't mention was to "ignore whitespace-only lines". That would work well in files, but it would HIDEOUS for interactive use. It'd mean that you would have to enter your NEXT command before reading (and execution) of the previous command, making it CERTAIN that your output will be out-of-sync. And I think it'd be a VERY bad idea for the syntax to vary between interactive and non-interactive use... it's confusing, and makes debugging rough. It varies in exactly that way in Python. And I haven't had too much problems with that, except that it makes copy-pasting code into the interpreter hard. Another solution would be to add another key-combindation interactively to mean "execute this, I'm done", but that would have the disadvantage of confusing people :( /Egil -- Konsulent, Fri Programvare / Free Software Consultant Cell: +47 - 91 17 05 93 Phone: +47 - 21 53 69 00, Fax: +47 - 21 53 69 09 Addr: Slemdalsveien 70, PB 1 Vinderen, 0319 Oslo Free beer costs nothing, freedom costs a fight. Free beer lasts an eavening, freedom lasts a lifetime.

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