Language design

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:08 AM, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
> On 2013-09-18, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 12:57 AM, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
>>> There's lots of poetry with significant indentation, though.
>>> Imbuing the shape of the text on the page with significance is a
>>> thing.
>>
>> And you can do that with C code, too. Doesn't mean that
>> indentation is important to C; it means that you're layering
>> different types of information into a single piece of work.
>> It's like Perl code drawn in the shape of a camel - a beautiful
>> hack.
>
> I just meant you can't condense whitespace in a poem and retain
> all its meaning. It will break certain kinds of quotation styles
> in publications, as well.

Sure. I'm still trying to work out if it's possible to deliver a
verbal speech with fancy information in its written version... English
is a fun language to tinker with!

ChrisA