Re: Tabs v.s. spaces (was Re: Programming first steps.)
On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 05:53:54PM -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:
> Tom wrote:
> >Significant whitespace? Shudder, that brings back crusty old memories
> >of Fortran. I have great fondness for fortran because of the wonderful
> >mathematical algorithms in LinPack, but I have no fondness for
> >significant whitespace.
>
> And? Does Fortran's rules map to Pythons? I often find that people
> who grouse about the whitespace are people who have never touched Python.
> Myself included before I touched Python. I can say this. I spent more
> time grousing about it in a few months than it has ever impacted my coding
> style in the years since.
>
> Have you touched Python?
No. I should have said that in my post.
Do whitespace mistakes cause compile time errors? The frustrating thing
about fortran was variable names that started with C could be
interpreted as comments not indented correctly, which would just cause
that line to be skipped. Integer literals not indented correctly could
be interpreted as line numbers and would really cause havoc with
computed gotos. I.e., they were as super-frustrating to debug as
misspelled variable names in a declaration-less language, or the types
of bizarre situtations you get into in C when you start overwriting
memory.
If whitespace mistakes are always caught at compile-time, then I
probably wouldn't care about them either. So I'm not bashing python;
having never used it: I'm bashing languages where syntatic mistakes are
not caught at compile-time. I have no idea if Python is in that
category or not.
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