From: markus@...
Date: 2004-10-08T08:36:27+09:00
Subject: Re: quality of error messages

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 07:39:04 +0900, Markus <markus@reality.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 15:19, Joachim Wuttke wrote:
> > > Thank you, Brian.
> > > This is quite a convincing example: I count not less than eight
> > > places where the "end" could be missing.
> > > Just for curiosity: why didn't Ruby borrow indentation semantics
> > > from Python ?
> >      Now there's an RCR I'd support.  Heck, I'd even volunteer to code
> > it!
> 
> I think you'll find more people who don't want such an abomination.
> 
> Python's indentation is the number one thing that prevents me from
> even considering using that language, because it forces me to work in
> a stupid manner (e.g., *its* manner), rather than adapting to my
> manner.

     *laugh*  I supose the reason I like the abomination is I learned to 
indent back in the days of salient structure (before the matching-pairs 
abomination took over the world).  To me (and by extension, all right 
thinking people), python's indentation seems perfectly natural.  I suppose 
it's all a matter of what abomination you grew up with.
     That said, it really doesn't hurt as bad as you'd think it would, 
since the main thing people differ on is where to put the closing token 
(e.g., does the "end" or "}" go at the indentation of the enclosed block 
or the inclosing block) and that issue vanishes if you don't have closing 
tokens.  I suspect that (if warned) most rubiests would find:

   class My_class
       attr_reader :an_atribute
       def initialize a1,a2
            @an_attribute = a1
            @counter = 0
            @limit = a2
       def feed_the_lion food
            raise "Roar" unless food.respond_to? :digestible_by
            raise "Grrr" unless food.digestible_by self
            digest food

    waffle = My_class.new :fred,14
 
perfectly readable (and writable) without all the syntactic clutter/noise.  
Required when you _don't_ pay attention to white space.  Further, it's 
well established that when there is discord between them people 
(including long time lispers) will "read the indentation" and ignore the 
punctuation regardless, so it reduces a significant source of bugs to 
have the language look at the same features of the source code as the 
person did.  About the only measured downside (IIRC) is that it increases 
the error rate when people are typing in code from a printed source.  That 
doesn't happen nearly as much as it used to.

     BTW, I am _not_ trying to push this change; I'm just trying to 
explain why I would not object to it, and suspect that many others would 
find it more palatable than they might think.

    -- Markus