Why whitespace denotation of blocks doesn't work.

[Thomas Wouters]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2000 at 06:30:18PM +0000, Thaddeus L. Olczyk wrote:

[Python's (metacomputational) speed]

> >The code can be typed in much faster; its SLOWER to type in the
> >braces.
> >
> Are you saying that you should choose a programming language based on
> how long it takes to type in things? If so then you should be using
> perl not python. The experts all agree that it is much faster to type
> in perl than python.

Not true. It may be possible to express certain ideas, operations,
algorithms in *less characters*, but that doesn't mean it's faster to type.
It may well be faster to type long words than to find the keys for $@{}[]->
;) And besides, like Eric Raymond said in his Linux Journal article (and
probably a lot of other times) the cool thing about Python is that you can
think it up almost as fast as you can type. (I agree, and I type pretty
fast, thanx to a good highschool teacher ;) This does not hold ture for
Perl (except perhaps for real hard-core hackers) where you constantly have
to think about how to write things.

> Me, I prefer a language which helps me write good code. Faster to type
> or slower to type doesn't make much difference to me. Of course if you
> want something that is faster to type, you can always go to perl.

I think the original author intended to say 'faster to write', instead of
'faster to type'. Writing implies typing (on computers, anyway, for those of
us who communicatie with the computer via a keyboard) but entails more than
just typing in the letters (or special characters ;-)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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