On 5/28/09, J Haas <Myrdred / gmail.com> wrote:
> I completely agree with you in principle, and I'm generally in favor
> of breaking with the past when such a break is warranted. But
> listening to the objections people have raised in this thread, for a
> lot of people it boils down to "I don't like it." Well, there's no
> accounting for taste, and while I happen to feel that many of these
> people would change their tune once they've had a little experience
> with syntactic indentation, I think the best way to assuage their
> doubts would be for any change to have absolutely no impact on
> existing code, with a clear distinction between old-style syntax and
> new-style indentation-aware syntax.

You're making an argument based on other people's opinions, for which
you have no evidence. I rather doubt that the naysayers on this thread
will be much convinced by such a fine point.

> Besides, I kind of like the look of the colon as a block-start
> delimiter. It emphasizes the separation between the loop or
> conditional or method call and the block it controls.

Ah, now we get down to it. It's really all just a matter of taste.

Would a semicolon make you just as happy? ;) It looks almost the same
and can be used where you want a colon already:

  while foo;
     bar

> Yep, looks totally weird to me too. Okay, so: no end-delimited blocks
> nested inside indentation-delimited blocks. Once you're inside a scope
> where the parser is paying attention to your indentation, it will
> continue paying attention to your indendation until you leave that
> scope.

Can you give an example of when you would want indentation to be
ignored that's not overly weird looking to you?