> How desperate the hunt for glyphs is in syntax design is exemplified by how Guido van Rossum did away with the canonical scope delimiters in Python, relying i

> How desperate the hunt for glyphs is in syntax design is exemplified by how Guido van Rossum did away with the canonical scope delimiters in Python, relying instead on indentation for this purpose. What could possibly be of such high value that a syntax designer would brave the controversy this caused? A high-value pair of matching glyphs, { and }, for other use in his syntax could. (This decision also made it impossible to write Fortran programs in Python, a laudable achievement in its own right.) The irony here is that Python does have an open-scope delimiter. It is the colon. What it lacks is a close-scope delimiter. But you can hack one using the PASS statement and emacs auto-indent, and in my code I do this so that my Python code always auto-indents correctly. Without this you cannot reliably cut-and-paste Python code because you can't count on leading white space being correctly preserved.