Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > Jussi Piitulainen <jpiit...@ling.helsinki.fi>: > >> a+ b => 7 # a() + b >> a +b => 3 # a(+b) => a(b) => a(1) = 1 + 2 >> >> I'm not quite fond of such surprise in programming language syntax. > > Yes, whoever came up with the idea of whitespace having syntactic > significance!
Yes, we should go back to the rules of ancient FORTRAN, where: DO100X=1.10,2 and DO 100 X = 1. 10, 2 mean exactly the same thing. Not. Whitespace is significant in nearly all programming languages, and so it should be. Whitespace separates tokens, and lines, and is a natural way of writing (at least for people using Western languages). *Indentation* is significant to Python, while most languages enable tedious and never-ending style wars over the correct placement of braces vis a vis indentation, because their language is too simple-minded to infer block structure from indentation. Python does derive block structure from indentation, as god intended (otherwise he wouldn't have put tab keys on typewriters) and so Python doesn't suffer from the interminable arguments about formatting that most other languages do. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
