Whitespace delimiters suck

[Roy Smith]

"tye4" <tye4 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I don't oppose indentation either. It's good for program readability, and
> readability only. It shouldn't be part of the syntax. Whitespace end
> delimiters are invisible and hence confusing and prone to error.

When I was first learning programming (a quarter of a century ago!), 
there was the idea of the "telephone test", i.e. your code should be 
simple enough that if you read it to somebody on the phone they would 
understand it.  Python not only fails the phone test, it fails the 
printed page test; I can print two programs on a piece of paper, which 
differ only in tabs and spaces, and they will appear identical yet which 
do different things.  Barf.

I'm in love with python, but this idea of white space as significant 
syntax is the biggest wart on the language by far.