Be gentle with me....

[François Pinard]

Preston Landers <prestonlanders at my-deja.com> writes:

> When I first came to Python from a C background, more than a year ago,
> I was also thrown off by indentation being syntactically significant.

Maybe the following might amuse some of you...

I (unsucessfully) tried a few times to convince Richard Stallman, in the
past years, that GNU C might be usefully augmented with an option in which
it would warn if a `}' was not on the very same line as the corresponding
'{', or else, was not on the very same column that the column of the
leftmost non-white character on the line containing the corresponding `{'.
(Of course, I also had other similar looking rules for many other cases,
as most of us know that C is a bit more than only a question of braces :-).

The basics of my idea was that it is a real big shame to not find a better
use for all the redundancy which exists in the indentation.  I thought that
GNU C was progressive enough to introduce that just-apparently-revolutionary,
yet still rather-simple-and-easily-implemented idea.  Could have been a hit!

So, of course, when I saw that Guido was pushing *my* idea so far to consider
the braces themselves as more noisy than informative, while retaining the
main underlying principle, I liked Python instantly, and I surely found
that Guido was a very clever guy! :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard