OT: This Swift thing

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 16:49:55 -0500, Mark H Harris wrote:

> 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. 

Cats.

"It's different. I don't like it."

> 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.

Or the off-side rule:

ABC, Boo, BuddyScript, Cobra, CoffeeScript, Converge, Curry, F#, Genie, 
Haml, (partially) Haskell, ISWIM, LiveScript, Miranda, Nemerle, Nimrod, 
Occam, PROMAL, Python, Sass, Spin, XL, Ya, YAML.


> The issue locally is trying to pass
> code snippets around the net informally is a problem with indentation.

I've been passing code snippets by email and Usenet for 15 years or more, 
and I've never had a problem with indentation.

Of course, I've had problems with *other people's code*, because they use 
broken tools that break the text they send.

If web forum software routinely replaced {} with &lbra;&rbra; or worse 
just deleted them altogether, do you imagine for a second people would 
say "braces are broken"? No of course not, they would say the forum 
software was broken, and fix the damn things.

If your email client, News reader, or web forum software replaces runs of 
whitespace with a single space, or deletes leading whitespace, or mangles 
it in any way, *it is broken* just as clearly as if replaced every second 
use of the letter "a" with a "z".

> 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!).

*rolls eyes*

Ah, the C brace style wars. The Number One productivity killer among 
programmers before the rise of easy public access to the Internet. Nice 
to see old traditions haven't been forgotten.


> We even have a couple of clucks on our side of the world that refuse to
> even get their feet wet in python because they hate the indentation
> paradigm.

Chances are that they use *exactly the same* indentation rules as Python, 
except no braces. And if they don't indent their code? Then they're bad 
programmers.


-- 
Steven