Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > >The only exception I can think of is *very* early Fortran, and that rightly >is considered a mistake. Fortran 77 used to treat whitespace as always >optional, so that in Python terms this: > >forxinrange(42) > >would be parsed as this: > >for x in range(42)
Absolutely true, and that led to one of the more famous computing screw-ups in the early space program. The author intended to write this: DO 10 I=1,8 which, in Fortran, begins a loop that will run 8 times ending at the statement labeled "10". In this case, the author mistakenly typed a period instead of a comma: DO 10 I=1.8 That, unfortunately, is a perfectly valid statement that assigns the value "1.8" to the floating point variable "DO10I", supposedly resulting in the loss of an unmanned launch vehicle... -- Tim Roberts, t...@probo.com Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list