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Re: A 21st Century Apple II?



mdj wrote:
On Mar 6, 6:13 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
mdj wrote:
On Mar 5, 9:35 pm, apple2fr...@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 5, 3:18 pm, mdj <mdj....@gmail.com> wrote:> On Mar 5, 4:07 pm, apple2fr...@gmail.com wrote:
I write Python as my day job. The one thing I'll give it, is that you
never again have to read badly formatted code, since indentation is
used as the block delimiter instead of language symbols.
I've always liked this approach to bracketing, since encountering
it in the 1970s as the "off-side rule" (meaning that when indenting
jumped back to the left ("off-side"), the intervening levels of
structure were "closed").

I've often wondered why it wasn't more common, since it makes the
code "mean" exactly the way it looks.

It does work well. My only complaint is that larger functions can have
their behaviour shifted just by a bit of formatting that might be off-
screen, and still run OK, so the old delimeter model still has the
advantage of being absolute. On balance though, it's an excellent
idea, since I don't write functions that large ;-)

Right--that's the key.

I once had a compiler issue a syntax error if a procedure went across
a page break unless it was inside a CASE statement!  ;-)

I think that a similar case can be made for limiting the maximum
"nesting level" for indents.  ;-)

-michael

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