Paul Schlyter wrote:
In article <4481749f$0$15787$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>, Kent Friis <nospam@nospam.invalid> wrote:Den Fri, 02 Jun 2006 21:53:25 -0700 skrev Michael J. Mahon:Many years later, I think that the "offside rule" for delimiting blocks simply by indentation is a very nice approach. Why on earth should white space, the most significant characteristic of text to the human eye, be ignored by most programming languages?For the same reason that comments, the most human readable text found in a program, are ignored by the programming language. Whitespace is an important part of making the program more readable. A programming language that prevents me to use white space to make code readable (because that would change what the code does) is just as bad as one that prevents me from writing a comment where needed (Actually, Visual Basic .NET does that in certain places. Yuck).Check out Python - there indentation delimits if blocks. And I cannot se any reason why: if condition statement1 statement2 else statement3 statement4 rest_of_program is more readable than: if condition statement1 statement2 else statement3 statement4 rest_of_program :-)
Actually, the first statement includes the <rest_of_program> in the else clause, since there is no delimiter. That difference is made clear in the second (off-side delimited) expression. I'm glad to hear that it has been adopted in a popular language. ;-) -michael Parallel computing for 8-bit Apple II's! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it is seriously underused."