Indentations and future evolution of languages

[Tim Rowe]

2009/3/8 Tim Roberts <timr at probo.com>:
> Tim Rowe <digitig at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>I don't think the article is right that "it's silly to have some
>>expression/statement groupings indentation based and some grouped by
>>enclosing tokens" -- provided it's done right. The OCAML-based
>>language F# accepts OCAML enclosing tokens, but if you mark the groups
>>with indentation they're not necessary (but still legal). That seems
>>to me to work pretty cleanly.
>
> Boy, I really want to like F# -- a lot of smart people have worked on it --
> but every program I write is completely incomprehensible to me a week
> later.
>
> The more I look around, the more I like Python.

Indentation works just fine in Python, too, just in case anybody
hadn't noticed ;-)

My point was that Python isn't alone on that whitespace-significant
plateau. F# is up here too. And so is FORTRAN, of course. We try to
ignore FORTRAN, but the distance we are able to edge away from it goes
to show how big the plateau is.

-- 
Tim Rowe