yet another indentation proposal

[Aaron]

Hello all.

I realize that proposals dealing with alternatives to indentation  have been 
brought up (and shot down) before, but I would like to take another stab at 
it, because it is rather important to me.

I am totally blind, and somewhat new to Python.  I put off learning Python 
for a long time, simply because of the indentation issue.  There is no easy 
way for a screenreader user, such as my self, to figure out how much a 
particular line of code is indented.  A sited person simply looks down the 
column to make sure that everything lines up.  I, on the other hand, 
generally find my self counting a lot of spaces.

Naturally, there are many other special circumstances in which depending on 
whitespace is impractical, but they have already been mentioned in previous 
threads on the topic, so I won't bother rehashing them.

Borrowing from another proposal, I would submit that the opening block and 
closing block markers could be _{ and }_ respectively.  If it seems that 
there is even a modicum of support, I'll write up a more complete proposal. 
But in short, an _{ will signify to the interpreter that one level of 
indentation is to be added to the current level, that all the statements 
that follow (until the closing _}) are to be understood to be at that level, 
and that all whitespace at the beginning of lines, or lack there of, is to 
be ignored.

I realize that this would result in some esthetically ugly code, and so 
naturally a simple tool to convert this type of block indication back to 
"normal indented format" should also be developed.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

I sincerely hope that this proposal can be given some serious consideration, 
and not simply dismissed as sacrilege.  There are many blind programmers, 
and I would hate to see them opt to learn other languages simply because of 
this one issue.

Thanks.

Aaron


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