do people really complain about significant whitespace?

[H J van Rooyen]

"Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

| On 8 Aug 2006 04:59:34 -0700, gslindstrom at gmail.com declaimed the
| following in comp.lang.python:
|
| >
| > Some of it may be a reaction from "old-timers" who remember FORTRAN,
| > where (if memory serves), code had to start in column 16 and code
| > continutations had to be an asterik in column 72 (it's been many years
| > since I've done any work in FORTRAN, but you get the idea)
| >
| Comment C in column 1
| (often extended to accept OS JCL markers too)
| Label numeric in 1-5
| Continuation anything in column 6
| (DEC, if using tab indents would take "<tab>&")
| Statement column 7-72
| Sequence/ID column 73-80
|
| I forget what COBOL used, but it had a few fields of its own.

The COBOL I used (NCR Century, Burroughs, some little IBM) was not fussy - the
only thing was that like in assembler, you had to start a lable  (that is a
symbolic name for an address) in the first column...

And you *had* to end what Python calls a "suite" with a fullstop - many hours
spent looking for weird bugs..

The breaking of the link between a lable or name and a memory address of
something is what I think most newcomers to Python find horribly confusing...

- Hendrik