From: Seebs Date: 2009-12-15T05:55:06+09:00 Subject: Re: Poll: Significant Indentation On 2009-12-14, David Masover wrote: > And again, _optional_ significant whitespace. Would you stop using Ruby if it > became an option? I don't think it makes sense to describe it as optional. If it's there, then the parser has to handle it for any modules which use it. Which means I have to deal with at least some incoming code using it, and that means I can no longer trust blocks to have end markers. You can talk about optional parentheses, because both in the pair are optional and we know how to detect the argument list. With significant whitespace, though... It seems like you'd have to know whether or not it was in use in advance. But basically, I find significant whitespace a sufficiently high barrier to reading and maintaining code that, if a noticeable chunk of Ruby code were written that way, I would probably lose a lot of interest. I frequently have to read and deal with other peoples' code to get things done, and if that code were illegible to me, that would be a big downside. I have yet to comprehend any circumstance in which whitespace significance does anything but increase the number of undetectable and uncorrectable failure modes. I'm pretty happy with 1.9 warning about mismatched indentation, because that DOES actually catch errors. But it only catches errors because it has an absolutely definite cue (the end token) to compare with. -s -- Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam@seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!