On 5/18/07, Eric Mahurin <eric.mahurin / gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> I've picked up on python in the last couple months and like the
> indentation.   In addition to forced readablity, I find another
> practical benefit is that it eliminates hard to track down syntax
> errors due to matching {}, begin/end, etc.  In ruby, C, perl, etc
> these errors can be painful to track down in a large file with lots of
> blocks within blocks.

You could always run it through a tool to clean up code and provide
proper indentation.  I personally don't like it when a language
dictates how my code ought to look, since I'm pretty picky myself :s

> Syntactically it isn't too difficult once you have the lexer generate
> indent and unindent tokens.  Then the parser just looks for matching
> indent and unindent tokens instead of {} or begin/end, etc.

When working in a team, regardless of how the code has been formatted,
I've always been able to slap pieces of code together and not worry
about indentation (when such language doesn't worry about
indentation).  Working in python always adds a little extra stress
when mixing and matching code, and the problem gets bigger when
indentation isn't standardized across teams or when applying code from
the web.

filipe