[wplug] first language

[billings at negate.org]

On Tue, 2003-04-01 at 11:59, bgtrio at yahoo.com wrote:
> Ooh, big scary whitespace.
...
> I don't get why people have such a problem with whitespace as opposed to 
> any other sytactic element.  It strongly encourages readability because 
> the positioning of the text gives you a clue as to the meaning of clause- 
> with nested brackets you sometimes have to do a lot of backtracking to 
> figure out where you are.
> 
> Ok, don't want to start a holy war, just don't like to see the snake 
> slandered :)
> 
> Bryguy
> 

My problem has always been this: It's nearly impossible to spot
whitespace "errors" (tab instead of spaces, for example).  Sure, if you
are using an editor that enforces the indent properly, that can save you
most of the time, but sometimes you might want to cut and paste code
from one section to another, or maybe run a regular expression
search-and-replace.  And what if you are using a different editor, to
make a quick fix?  All these examples could introduce invisible errors.

And, in my opinion, I don't think it's the languages' role to enforce
the visible structure of the code, because it's not always the case that
a simple indentation rule will improve the readability of the code.  

-- 
Jonathan S Billings <billings at negate.org>
TSFNKP