Re: Is the dangling else a syntax bug?

"Joachim Durchholz" <joachim_d@gmx.de> schreibt:


>An interesting variation of this is the use of unindentation as "end"
>marker. This has been done e.g. in Python and Haskell.


Did you ever see source code with a mix of tab and space characters?
Such text becomes unreadable to both a human and a compiler, when the
tab size is changed to some user defined value. The whole source code
then is bound to a specific editor :-(


But perhaps I misunderstood your point. When the editor inserts the
appropriate End keyword whenever a line is outdented, then everything
is okay. But then it's a feature of the editor, not of the language.


The use of EOL as a delimiter was discussed in a recent thread, and I
think that it's not a practical solution. Then at least continuation
lines must be introduced at the same time, to allow to break long
lines into multiple shorter lines.


Line breaks can cause problems, as I just had with Delphi and Unix
source files. The compiler complained about too long lines, whereas
the editor displayed the \n (without \r) as line ends. IMO we should
leave the use of line breaks and indentation to the human user, and
let the compiler ignore white space, control characters, and comments.


DoDi
[Line-oriented languages with continuation markers work fine. I used
to use one, For-something. -John]

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