use Perl

• whitespace (Score:2)

  by inkdroid (3294)

  Thankfully he didn't say anything about whitespace. That complaint gets old quick :-)
  • Re:whitespace (Score:1)

    by zatoichi (4897)

    We already know that forcing whitespace is a bad thing, so it didn't need to be said. ;-)
    • Re:whitespace (Score:2)

      by inkdroid (3294)

      Perhaps I've hung out here too long...
    • Re:whitespace (Score:2)

      by gnat (29)

      I've been playing with Python, and I'm much more sanguine about the whitespace thing now that I've used it. Any Python smackdown requires more than "whitespace bad, curlies good". But it still deserves a smackdown. All that nonsense about being intuitive and executable pseudocode is fiction.

      --Nat
      • Re:whitespace (Score:1)

        by zatoichi (4897)

        I have used Python as well. The longer I had to deal with the indentation the more annoying it got to me.
      • Re:whitespace (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983)

        Don't care much for all those underscores around methods either, huh?
  • I'm a little saddened by that, actually (Score:1)

    by btilly (5037)

    I would have loved to see him include COBOL in that list, and see whether any Python fans figured it out.
    
    OTOH given how much flack Larry has taken over significant whitespace rules in Perl 6, he may feel that it is best to just avoid that topic.
  • Re:whitespace (Score:2)

    by rafael (2125)

    Actually he did [perl.org]. Well, not really whitespace, but indentation nonetheless.
• Fortran had Facist whitespace first (Score:1)

  by n1vux (1492)

  Fortran had mandatory whitespace / indents -- columns 1-6 and 73-80 were sacred. (There weren't columns past 80 in Fortran, since even on TTY Fortran "knew" it was reading "cards" *sigh*)

  Google finds us a reference [umd.edu] from which I can reconstruct the following, which I could almost have recited from slowly fading memory:

  • Statement labels in columns 1 to 5
  • C or * in column 1 indicates comment
  • Non-zero non-blank in Column 6 is Continuation marker (like \ at end of line, except at beginning of next line!)
  • Sta

  --
  Bill
  # I had a sig when sigs were cool
  use Sig;