OT: This Swift thing

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Mark H Harris <harrismh777 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/3/14 3:43 PM, Sturla Molden wrote:
>>
>> Nicholas Cole <nicholas.cole at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> {snip}
>
>> Unfortunately they retained the curly brackets from JS...
>>
>
> The curly braces come from C, and before that B and A/.
>
> (I think others used them too before that, but it escapes me now and I'm too
> lazy to google it)
>
> ... but the point is that curly braces don't come from JS !

If a merger between JS and Python adopts braces, the braces came from
JS. You look at a baby and say he has his father's nose
(http://tinyurl.com/kqltth4 perhaps?), not that he has his
great-grandmother's nose, even if it's the same nose.

> I have been engaged in a minor flame debate (locally) over block delimiters
> (or lack thereof) which I'm loosing. Locally, people hate python's
> indentation block delimiting, and wish python would adopt curly braces. I do
> not agree, of course; however, I am noticing when new languages come out
> they either use END (as in Julia) or they propagate the curly braces
> paradigm as in C.   The issue locally is trying to pass code snippets around
> the net informally is a problem with indentation. My reply is, well, don't
> do that. For what I see as a freedom issue, folks want to format their white
> space (style) their way and don't want to be forced into an indentation
> paradigm that is rigid (or no so much!).

I quite like braces, myself, but I'm happy with either model. But I
don't like massively verbose "END" blocks, nor the syntactic salt of
bash's case/esac, if/fi, etc (match the end marker to the beginning).
Keep it simple and keep it unobtrusive.

ChrisA