In the case of Python, yes, it is prejudice. Have you ever coded in Python? If anything throws you off, it's going to be thinking in Python idioms, not the whitespace. In earlier languages, "significant indentation" meant something entirely different (columns 0-20 are comments, etc.). Python's use of indentation means that the interpreter uses the same code-block delimiters that the people reading and writing the code use.
Significant indentation is great. Wait, come back! Don't put this in the language yet! I'm not done! Significant indentation is great for languages like Python, in which code blocks are different from expressions and never go smack in the middle of a function call.
I've seen attempts to do significant indentation in Lisp, and instead of getting simple and pretty like Python, it gets all tangled and ugly. Ideas that are great in one context may be horrible in another. Need I remind you what happened when Larry Wall tried to combine all the great ideas from a bunch of different languages into one?
If you claim it's great for languages like python, and that's fine if you want it. I do know python, but I don't use it actively because I detest its engineer engineering and its significant whitespace.
But Lisps and Arc are not Python, or even a language like Python. And making a terminator or separator character that is both invisible and munged differently on many platforms seems like an extremely bad idea to me.
No, it's common sense. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer being able to tell if code is syntactically correct just by looking at it instead of having to perform a hex dump. Never mind being able to reconstruct indentation from syntax when it eventually gets mangled in email/forum postings/code restructuring.
> Have you ever coded in Python?
Yes I have. Apart from the above caveat it's quite a nice language, although I find Ruby more elegant.
> Need I remind you what happened when Larry Wall tried to combine all the great ideas from a bunch of different languages into one?
Yes, it got hugely popular. You got a problem with that?
> No, it's common sense. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer being able to tell if code is syntactically correct just by looking at it instead of having to perform a hex dump.
Are you trying to say that source code (either with or without meaningful indentation) requires a hex dump to read? Or are you talking about object code (in which case I am pretty sure indentations is entirely irrelevant).
>> Need I remind you what happened when Larry Wall tried to combine all the great ideas from a bunch of different languages into one?
> Yes, it got hugely popular. You got a problem with that?
I don't know about you but Perl's conglomerate syntax, combined with all that extra magic, makes Perl pretty unmanageable in my opinion after a couple hundred lines of code.
From pg's essay Arc at 3 Weeks:
"We're also going to try not to make the language look like a cartoon character swearing. [...] (Dan Giffin recently observed that if you measure Perl programs by the number of keys you have to press, they don't seem so short.)"
hehe sure you can borrow that part. i don't know any python so you'd be burning the null brain. the indentation sensitivity is actually the reason i never got interested in that language. it's probably just the fact that things aren't explicitly closed -- something i wouldn't mind in lisp but feels like standing on a plank in the middle of the ocean in a structured language like python, probably due to the mixture of symbolic and visual notation which totally weirds me out man
though i'm sure it's really just an exaggeration in my mind due to only hearing about that aspect of the language, and i probably would have gotten used to it easily enough
Please, lets not get into a "yes it is"/"no it isn't" argument here!
I am aware of some rather horrid languages that forced the use of meaningful indentation, but that doesn't make indentation evil in and of itself.
As for in Lisp, a number of people have tried to add it to Arc (including pg) without too much success. It seems that meaningful indentation lends itself much better to statement based languages than expression based ones.
