Using indentation for blocking

[Fredrik Lundh]

mictali <dwaf at my-deja.com> wrote:
> I was just wondering why Python was designed to use whitespace as the
> block seperators instead of hard indicators (such as {} in C).

this is, of course, a FAQ:
http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html#6.2

(also see any of the many threads on this topic in
the newsgroup archives.  and yes, you can control
whitespace in XML and SGML -- after all, people
have written Python programming books in such
languages ;-)

</F>

  "We will perhaps eventually be writing only small
  modules which are identified by name as they are
  used to build larger ones, so that devices like
  indentation, rather than delimiters, might become
  feasible for expressing local structure in the source
  language."

  -- Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with goto
  Statements", Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974