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.
Naturally, there are many other special circumstances in which depending on
whitespace is impractical, but they have already been mentioned in previous
threads on the topic, so I won't bother rehashing them.
Borrowing from another proposal, I would submit that the opening block and
closing block markers could be _{ and }_ respectively. If it seems that
there is even a modicum of support, I'll write up a more complete proposal.
But in short, an _{ will signify to the interpreter that one level of
indentation is to be added to the current level, that all the statements
that follow (until the closing _}) are to be understood to be at that level,
and that all whitespace at the beginning of lines, or lack there of, is to
be ignored.
I realize that this would result in some esthetically ugly code, and so
naturally a simple tool to convert this type of block indication back to
"normal indented format" should also be developed.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
I sincerely hope that this proposal can be given some serious consideration,
and not simply dismissed as sacrilege. There are many blind programmers,
and I would hate to see them opt to learn other languages simply because of
this one issue.
Thanks.
Aaron
--
To reply directly, remove j's from email address.
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
