mdj wrote:
> On Mar 6, 6:13 pm, "Michael J. Mahon"  wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> It does work well. My only complaint is that larger functions can have
> their behaviour shifted just by a bit of formatting that might be off-
> screen, and still run OK, so the old delimeter model still has the
> advantage of being absolute. On balance though, it's an excellent
> idea, since I don't write functions that large ;-)

Right--that's the key.

I once had a compiler issue a syntax error if a procedure went across
a page break unless it was inside a CASE statement!  ;-)

I think that a similar case can be made for limiting the maximum
"nesting level" for indents.  ;-)

-michael

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