mdj wrote:
> On Mar 5, 9:35 pm, apple2fr...{at}gmail.com wrote:
>> On Mar 5, 3:18 pm, mdj  wrote:> On Mar
5, 4:07 pm, apple2fr...{at}gmail.com wrote:

> I write Python as my day job. The one thing I'll give it, is that you
> never again have to read badly formatted code, since indentation is
> used as the block delimiter instead of language symbols.

I've always liked this approach to bracketing, since encountering
it in the 1970s as the "off-side rule" (meaning that when indenting
jumped back to the left ("off-side"), the intervening levels of
structure were "closed").

I've often wondered why it wasn't more common, since it makes the
code "mean" exactly the way it looks.

I once "inherited" the maintenance of a text formatting tool written
in Cobol (!), so I had to learn Cobol on the fly.  I was astonished
to learn that in this "easy" language, the presence or absence of
a single period in the middle of a nest of IF statements would
completely alter the IF nesting without causing any syntax errors!

What a violation of the "least surprise" principle, when a flyspeck
can make one program read like another!

-michael

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