If white space carries any function that the compiler/interpreter needs to know about like structure or scope, it’s probably not a very good programming language.
Genuine question: why? What makes, say a semicolon, so superior to the the newline or tab characters?
To be clear: I don’t think whitespace as a part of syntax is an awesome idea which should be more popular. It’s definitely a bit more error prone in some ways. It’s not perfect. But it’s okay.
I’ve written a lot of Python and I don’t think I have ever seen a syntax error caused by incorrect whitespace. I’m not exaggerating. I regularly forget semicolons in other languages but I never type out incorrectly indented code. Maybe that’s just me though…
I honestly think the scripting languages like fish have got it right.
Newline by default completes a line and can optionally be escaped. Saves you most of the semicolons and even implicitly highlights multi-line statements.
Whitespace doesn’t matter except for separating names.
Blocks are explicitely ended without braces you can confuse with brackets or parentheses, no matter the coding style.
If Rust and fish had a baby, I think it would be the best language to have ever been created.
From some one who used Python as it was the easiest solution to few of my problems, and having to experience languages with brackets and/or endif/fi/done as ways to limit scope, I find that having things like brackets and/or scope terminators easier to parse and less error-prone. I’m thinking about moving on to Ruby whenever I had a need where Python would be a good choice, but the time it takes for me to understand a new language is blocking me from that.
How do you feel about line breaks?
Not who you asked but I think they’re important for humans, but syntactically I don’t think they should matter.
It should be ok to add a line break wherever it makes the code more readable, but I don’t think a compiler should care whether some code is all on one line or 10
Intmain(intfoo){std::out<<“HelloWorld”;}
Is a great program and should totally be valid cpp. White space sucks.
/S
deleted by creator
Personally, I think that if you’d rather write
foo?a:bthanfoo ? a : b, you’re probably insanedeleted by creator
I agree! I don’t think
3?”stuff”:”empty”should work at all because I think it’s an insane way to type a ternary :) I’m also very open to admitting that it’s just my own strongly worded opinion.I think that in most cases, syntactically significant whitespace is a horrible idea - the one exception being that you should have space between operators/identifiers/etc. I don’t care how much, and 4 spaces should have no more special meaning than 1, but I do think that using a space to indicate “this thing is a different thing than the thing before it” is important.
deleted by creator
Load-bearing whitespace is the fucking devil. This thread about hot takes is topped by a comment highlighting how people can’t even agree what kind of whitespace to use.
Python - you want code to fail if someone from one camp copy-pastes code from another camp, and the characters that make a difference are invisible?
