Alternate indent proposal for python 3000

[Dan Bishop]

On Apr 20, 11:42 am, Matthew Woodcraft
<matth... at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Christian Heimes  <li... at cheimes.de> wrote:
>
> >> I feel that including some optional means to block code would be a big
> >> step in getting wider adoption of the language in web development and
> >> in general.  I do understand though, that the current strict indenting
> >> is part of the core of the language, so... thoughts?
> > Why should Python repeat the mistakes other languages did with SSI or
> > <?php ?> inline code? Python favors the MVC separation of code and layout.
>
> An alternative scheme for describing the block structure could be
> useful in other cases, though. For example, if you wanted to support
> putting snippets of Python in configuration files, or spreadsheet
> cells.
>
> There's no need to support the new scheme in .py files, so it seems to
> me that this doesn't have to be done in the core language. All that's
> needed is a variant of 'eval' which expects the alternate scheme, and
> that could be prototyped just using text manipulation and the normal
> 'eval'.

We wouldn't even need that.  Just a new source encoding.  Then we
could write:

# -*- coding: end-block -*-

def _itoa(num, base):
"""Return the string representation of a number in the given base."""
if num == 0:
return DIGITS[0]
end if
negative = num < 0
if negative:
num = -num
end if
digits = []
while num:
num, last_digit = divmod(num, base)
digits.append(DIGITS[last_digit])
end while
if negative:
digits.append('-')
end if
return ''.join(reversed(digits))
end def