Whitespace (Was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.)

Ramon Pereda, <rpereda@wotangate.sc.ti.com> wrote:
>Jonathan Eifrig <eifrig@beanworld.cs.jhu.edu> wrote:
>: : Personally, I view a language as a "scripting" language if (1) whitespace
>: : is significant...
>:
>: Whitespace is significant in nearly all modern languages. You can't
>: put whitespace inside a token in C, Ada, Modula, Lisp, Perl, etc. And
>: you typically *must* put whitespace between two adjacent alphanumeric
>: tokens in any of these languages.


Perhaps I should have been more clear: what I meant was that in
most scripting languages, sequences of "whitespace" characters
(which normally include SPACE, TAB, and NEWLINE) are not equivalent.
Which means, or course, that such "whitespace" isn't really "white" at
all, since there is semantic meaning attached to the various forms of
"whitespace" in the program, other than the usual use of tokenization.


C doesn't escape such cruftiness either, unfortunately: "\<NEWLINE>"
is not the same as "\<SPACE><NEWLINE>", and the fact that preprocessor
directives must start in column 1 means that the newline character isn't
really "white" at all. An unfortunate legacy of the preprocessor.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Jack Eifrig (eifrig@cs.jhu.edu) The Johns Hopkins University, C.S. Dept.
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