On 3/18/25 04:01, Mr wrote:
> I'm sure more expert people in various languages will be able to teach me
> something important from what is probably a naive question :  What if in POV 4
> we had the possibility to use spaces or tabs as a synonym to what curly braces
> currently do, but we could still use those braces themselves ?
> 
> That way new comers would feel at first glance that the language is as easy to
> learn as Python, and would rapidly understand as they do in Python, that what
> matters is that they do know what scope they're in.
> 
> and eventually, depending on *whichever* option gets to become the most popular
> among core developers and power users, it can become a maintenance cost
> reduction to drop one or the other?
> 
> Inspiration for this idea? of course, python... I love how it has grown able to
> do type annotations, switch cases, etc. and while across versions leverage many
> advanced concepts teaching them to me as it went, and now they are there, I love
> how a new comer could still pick it up exactly the way I did, with a human
> readable almost fiction-book like syntax, and still produce scripts that do
> work, syntactic-sugar-free.  BUT I know there must be a reason why those curly
> braces are still there isn't there? so I trust people to tell me... maybe so
> that POV acts as a launching pad to learn C-like languages in which it is itself
> developed?
> 

Significant whitespace is a terrible, terrible idea, and Guido should be 
smacked for it. Because we *knew* it was a terrible idea before Python 
was even a gleam in his eye. Makefiles taught us that years earlier.

You ever had an entire build blow up because someone else on the dev 
team edited a file using different editor settings, and it introduced an 
*invisible* syntax error that took half a day to track down while 
everyone else's work ground to a halt? I have.

-- 
John Campbell
jca### [at] lynnci-ncom

Post a reply to this message