Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition

schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de (Joachim Schrod) writes:
> [indentation syntax makes it hard to generate programs]


Could you provide some more details? I've heard this argument
before, but it's not clear to me that it would be any harder to
generate N tabs than to generate block delimeters correctly. How
hard is it to keep a global tab counter?


Even if you're just pasting blocks of code together randomly, you
must have some notion of enclosing context, right? FWIW, I _have_
generated code for an indentation-based language (Python), with no
problems at all. Perhaps you have some unique constraints (?)




>The markup language crowd learned it's lesson long ago: Please, no
>optical markup. Add explicite tags to your document. Why don't we
>stay with that?


But why must writing programs be like writing a document with a
markup language? IMHO, we already have plenty of problems with
maintainability as it is.


The point is that compilers should be able to use all the information
communicated by the programmer (indentation, end-lines), rather than
forcing extra, error-prone tokens.


Of course, YMMV; but I've seen many people become adicted to this
syntax system, after using it.


Mark Lutz
--

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