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From: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: improve world by dropping languages with ;
Message-ID: <3024@charon.cwi.nl>
Date: 25 Feb 91 22:07:53 GMT
References: <1991Feb25.173154.29456@linus.mitre.org>
Sender: news@cwi.nl
Lines: 20

john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger) writes:

>I have very strong intuitions about stylistic things
>like indenting.  One of these intuitions is that it's impossible to
>legislate style.

Oh?  I've never heard anybody request the right to define their own
string quotes or reserved words (for example) in a programming
language.  You take what the language gives you, period.  Why is it
that rules for the use of whitespace provoke such strong reactions?
Could it be a knee-jerk reaction of the kind "the rules for lay-out in
Fortran, Basic and Assembler (for example) are wrong, therefore all
languages with rules for lay-out are wrong" ?

For those who take the worn-out word "freedom" in their mouth in
response to this, think about strong typing.  Strong typing reduces
your freedom as a programmer.  Is this necessarily bad?
--
Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@cwi.nl>
Honary Member, Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things