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From: rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: improve world by dropping languages with ;
Summary: FORTR ANliv eson?
Message-ID: <1991Feb23.013443.15843@ico.isc.com>
Date: 23 Feb 91 01:34:43 GMT
References: <21900005@inmet> <UUEO3RO@math.fu-berlin.de> <21733@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <1991Feb22.211643.12151@linus.mitre.org>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corporation, Boulder, CO
Lines: 25

john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger) writes:
> How can anyone stand to program in a language where whitespace matters
> in this way?  Why should the status of my code depend on whitespace?

Probably people don't mind programming in a language where whitespace
matters because they also write in natural languages where whitespace
matters.

In fact, one relatively common form of bug in languages where whitespace
doesn't matter is where the layout of the program doesn't reflect the
syntactic structure.  Human readers miss the bug precisely because they
*do* care about the whitespace, even more than about the punctuation.
For example, in C:
	if (x<0)
		fprintf(stderr, "blah blah babble %f\n", x);
		exit(1);
Many people will have to look at this several times to figure out why the
program exits here regardless of the value of x, because they see the
whitespace and ignore the punctuation.

I think it would be a step forward to move human and compiler
interpretation of code closer together.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...But is it art?