On May 28, 11:15 ¨Âí¬ ÅìåáîïÍãÈõçè ¼åìåá®®®Àçáíåó÷éôèâòáéîó®ãïíwrote: > You might just as well tell the Lisp community that all those brackets > they use are redundant. Sheesh, talk about strawmen. In Lisp, the parens are anything _but_ redundant. Lisp without brackets is riddled with ambiguity. Conventionally-indented Ruby is not. > So contrary to how you feel about this, one size doesn't fit all - > especially not in matters of aesthetics. Indeed I suspect that much of > the resistance that you've experienced in this thread is a reflection > of the fact that your original post and this one both show an equal > lack of awareness of that fact. Yes, I was so unaware of this in my original post that I very specifically made a proposal that would leave existing syntax unchanged, which would allow people who wanted to use 'end' to continue to use 'end', and which would break no existing code. My proposal involved purely optional syntax, reflecting the fact that many Rubyists are not convinced that syntactic indentation is the way to go. While one size certainly doesn't fit all, and while there's no accounting for taste, some sizes seem to fit most people better than others. Charles said that he preferred chocolate ice cream to Python. Well, I don't know about that, but I'm betting he also prefers chocolate ice cream to, say, mud... at least for eating. And I daresay most people would prefer chocolate ice cream to mud for mud. But one size doesn't fit all, and in a world of seven billion you can probably find a handful of people whose preferences go the other way. So while it may not be strictly accurate to say that chocolate ice cream is "better" for eating than mud, it's close enough for most purposes. And there's nothing wrong with approaching people who are chowing down on mud because they've never _tried_ chocolate ice cream, handing them a big ol' bowl of the good stuff, and saying, "Here, try this, you'll probably like it better." Nor is there anything wrong with thinking there's something a bit odd about those who, having tried both, prefer the mud. Nor is there anything wrong with rolling your eyes at people who say, "I tried half a teaspoon of your 'iced cream', and I like the mud better." I think I've just about stretched this analogy to the breaking point, but I predict that if my proposal is implemented, and people are given the choice to use syntactic indentation, within a couple of years it'll be the norm, and most Ruby programmers will think it a bit weird that anyone fought against it.