Is there anything *enjoyable* about our development process?

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

"Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart at bmsi.com> writes:

> Long answer: Ruby uses braces like C.  As for Python, you're
> thinking of (old) Fortran, and RPG, where you had to put things into
> magic columns on your punch cards.  Apparently, you haven't
> seriously looked at Python - which is "indent" dependent, not white
> space dependent.  

I know perfectly well what the syntax of Python is.  It is not
white-space independent; that makes it therefore white-space
dependent.  I cannot break lines where I please; I cannot insert or
remove white-space where I please.

Among other things, that makes automatically-generated python a royal
PITA to generate.  It also means that generating python must suddenly
be context dependent in a really ugly way: a given snippet of code
cannot simply be included anywhere; it must be very carefully indented
to match its context.

This is not modern.

> "Indent" and "Outdent" are tokens in the language with a function
> similar to braces.

Except that the lexical way to signal a brace is with the ASCII {
character.  By contrast, the lexical way to signal indent and outdent
are dependent on the rest of the lexical context.

Thomas