Yep. It was a few years ago while that was stilled allowed (as I'd noted ;) ) but regardless. Significant whitespace is just annoying.. There's a lot of things that render as whitespace, and source code one might be reviewing could be printed wrapped or copied and pasted in odd ways. Other languages are more robust to this.
I feel that the main point still stands, though. Saying that Python doesn't have a whitespace problem because you can send the code through a tool that detects whitespace-related problems still acknowledges the existence of said problem.
Well, in C the visual indentation and the meaning of the code (given by {}) can diverge. That's even worse, and happens in practice. Many style guidelines for C have evolved specifically to address that problem with 'the language itself'.
The compiler doesn't check your indentation at all. (OK, not true, these days you get warnings for misleading indentation.) But here's an example of misleading indentation in C:
if(some condition)
do something; {
do something else;
}
do another thing;
You can stretch 'some condition' out over multiple lines and have some more parents inside of it, to make it more confusing.
Not necessarily. In practice, in C-as-actually-used people (should) set up linters and formatters, so that you can rely on indentation.
When programming, this means that you can behave as if both curly braces and indentation are significant, and you get an error when they are out-of-sync.
I think its more of an tooling issue. If your editor / diff viewer cant differentiate between different whitespaces get a better one. Also if you want to ensure some function isnt in local scope etc just test it.
> There's a lot of things that render as whitespace
Like what? As you note, mixing tabs and spaces is now an error.
I've never understood the objection to semantic whitespace. Complaining about having to indent code correctly strikes me as being akin to complaining about having to pee in the toilet instead of the bathtub.
there is a huge difference between having a coding standard (handled easily by a linter on commit in most languages) and making a particular whitespace indentation a critical language feature.
Bonus, if there's a good reason to change the linter format, you can do so.
Rust handles this rather well I think.
