> Maybe it was just a very special try of being funny? Whoever wrote it can clear this up easily by stating what his intention was. Personally, my experience was that sarcasm or irony often does not bode well in written text. Additionally, often people assume that something is insulting or otherwise harmful against them - written text is often limited in expressing human *intentions*. Or, some people have a hard time expressing their thoughts. But anyway, let's jump to the proposal again (and we can see that this generated quite a stir... huge huge huge here hehe.) I dont want to write too much, so I try to be short and concise: - Personally, i think it *would* be nice to omit "end" and have my code still work. I do indent my code already with two spaces all the time for every meaningful code block anyway. Those "end's" aren't really helpful for my eyes. - I do however not have a serious problem with that. It would be nice, but it is nothing where I would say "ruby sucks" because I cant omit ends. To me, it is not really important. - As far as language design is concerned, I personally think it is not elegant if a parser bothers too much about meaningful indent. Instead, I think a parser should try to capture the INTENT of the programmer, and it is stupid if a parser stops working because the INDENT was wrong. It just strikes me as inelegant - and keep in mind that I said, I wouldn't mind to omit end at all. I found it silly to not be able to just paste code into the interactive python shell, and have it work. It complained about whitespace crap, and I found this insulting. I think the best way would be for a parser who could allow for both, with "end" being the default, but a switch which could allow for a shorter ruby-like syntax where one can omit "end". - I think python has one solid argument going for it (and please also keep in mind that I hate other python choices, especially the __foo__(): part. That includes the ':' in there as well) - whitespace and homogeneous structure would be something _I_ would appreciate. I love ruby's flexibility, but I would also love to have something super-concise AND homogeneous. And more readable, IMHO, too. - As written above, I have one problem with the python whitespace. And this is the ':' part. I hate that. 'if foo:' I do NOT want to get rid of "end" in ruby, if that means introducing something like ':'. The ':' is not beautiful at all, and thus it would not be a real improvement for me, if I have to clutter my code with ':'. - I do not think that you applied the DRY statement correctly, because DRY applies for code logic primarily, not for satisfying a parser. And the "end" is there because of the parser. > Programmers shouldn't be using freakin' tabs anyway, > and if they are, they _definitely_ shouldn't be mixing them with spaces. Personally I used to like tabs, and reasoned that people could set their tabs width to whatever they like. But then I realized that i do comment my own code a lot, and suddenly I was mixing tabs with spaces. I stopped at that very day, and used 2 spaces (2, because I usually like to have 80 chars per line, and not more. I am that old, really. I like 80 chars per line, even though i sometimes use more than that - i think it is a good general rule of thumb to cut down below 80 chars / line, and with 4 spaces i just hit that threshold sooner) Anyway, I think this is all mostly just happy discussing here. Ruby is the way it is, and to change something as fundamental as indent is way too difficult and probably has no huge gain whatsoever. Didn't Guido once say that, if he could switch one thing in python, he would no longer use significant whitespace? -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.