New to Python - block grouping (spaces)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2015 04:07 am, Dan Sommers wrote:

> Smalltalk, Forth, and LISP don't follow the program=textfile system
> (although LISP can, and does sometimes);

Correct, and the fact that they wrapped code and environment into a
completely opaque image was a major factor in their decline in popularity
for all three languages.

http://www.ianbicking.org/where-smalltalk-went-wrong.html
http://www.ianbicking.org/where-smalltalk-went-wrong-2.html


Source as text means that you can use any text based tool with little or no
effort. Using a non-text binary blob for source code means that your
options are much more limited. Look at source control software like git and
mercurial (hg): they automatically work on any language based on lines of
text code. There is no need for hg-for-java, hg-for-python, hg-for-ruby,
hg-for-javascript, hg-for-c, there is just hg. But if languages were
image-based like Smalltalk, hg would require special knowledge of the
internals of each compiler's image file format.


-- 
Steven