Language design

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2013-09-13, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> Poetry, including that in English, often *is* concerned with formatting.
>> Code is more like poetry than prose.
>>
>>
>>> You can take this
>>> paragraph of text, unwrap it, and then reflow it to any width you
>>> like, without materially changing my points.
>>
>>
>> But you cannot do that with poetry!
>
> Evangelical vicar in want of a portable second-hand font. Would
> dispose, for the same, of a portrait, in frame, of the Bishop-elect of
> Vermont.
>
> I think you could quite easily reconstruct the formatting of
> that, based on its internal structure. Even in poetry, English
> doesn't depend on its formatting nearly as much as Python does;
> and even there, it's line breaks, not indentation - so we're
> talking more like REXX than Python. In fact, it's not uncommon
> for poetry to be laid out on a single line with slashes to
> divide lines:

There's lots of poetry with significant indentation, though.
Imbuing the shape of the text on the page with significance is a
thing.

-- 
Neil Cerutti