yet another indentation proposal

[proteusguy at gmail.com]

On Aug 18, 2:22 pm, "Aaron" <cajnnjo... at fjireanjtjprodjuctijons.com>
wrote:
> 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.
<snip>

    Very interesting 'reading' code verbally. I would think this would
be far less efficient than using a braille line display, especially if
there were a multi-line display which I'm not sure exists (but
should). Anyway, as someone who is a very fond of python's use of
indentation for flow control, I also see that it is not always
appropriate for EVERY form of computing I'd like to apply python too
and I wish there were an alternative control flow form which was
considered valid in all respects but frowned upon when not used in the
exception cases intended. Also it should be a form in which a parser
could easily convert back and forth from at ease so you could code in
one format and deploy in another.

    Besides your excellent example, the context that I have in mind is
embedded python running in a web browser ala javascript. You
absolutely cannot count on whitespace when your code is going through
the parser/converter gauntlet that the typical html page must go
through before being delivered to its requestor. As a student of
language design I find javascript an abomination and have long
wondered whether or not this dependency on whitespace hasn't taken
python out of the running from being a very popular and appropriate
contender. (I realize that the restricted execution environment of old
python was abandoned but maybe browser python is a strict subset?)

    I really am not at the point of making this a proposal. Really I'm
just curious as to whether or not I'm the only person who thinks this
and would like to see if the concept has any traction. This is no low
impact concept so I'm not holding my breath. I will say, however, that
the web browser would be a far more pleasant development environment
if it spoke python rather than javascript. I feel strongly that its
the best internet service language (wonderful std libs) and its OO and
functional paradigm would play nicely in a browser environment. I have
python on all my computers regardless of operating system and cpu. I
have python embedded in C++ apps and C++ apps embedded in python.
Python runs on my phone! Python runs on the JVM and the CLR. Python
runs everywhere - except my browser.

    ...just dreaming...

    -- Ben