John Campbell <jca### [at] lynnci-ncom> wrote:
> 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

Sure it happens, until the ide is properly configured.

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