From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-05-26T03:30:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Pythonic indentation (or: beating a dead horse)

On Wednesday 20 May 2009 05:28:34 pm Tony Arcieri wrote:

> You are proposing a Rube Goldberg contraption whereby the scanner would
> require some degree of grammatical awareness.  This is a complex solution.
> The minor flaw is that you don't like "end" statements.  Is the minor flaw
> of having repeated end statements really worth the level of complexity the
> solution would require?

If we're admitting that a parser is possible, but would only be complex, I 
would say yes, it's worth it.

Ruby itself is based on the idea that the computer should work for you, not 
the other way around. The language should be made simpler for a human to 
understand and work with, even if it makes the implementation more complex and 
slower. My understanding is, this is the founding principle of Ruby -- the 
whole reason it was invented in the first place.

Of course, the more important question is whether this can be done in such a 
way that is either wholly backwards compatible, or which doesn't irritate 
people who like Ruby's current syntax?

The social aspect seems to be the larger issue, here.