4 ms·

I think your example is a little too much. Whitespace isn't significant in C. When talking about programming languages, I don't think whitespace refers to spa

• masklinn 15y ago
  > Whitespace isn't significant in C. As demonstrated, it is. > When talking about programming languages, I don't think whitespace refers to spaces between tokens. But that makes no sense, it is whitespace, and it has semantic significance (hence being significant). Whitespace was not significant in older versions of Fortran, and that allowed you to write DO30I=10,100 which was interpreted as DO 30 I = 10, 100 that is non-significant whitespace. Ruby has long struggled with how it interpreted its whitespace, for a long time sin (x) + y would be interpreted as sin(x + y) for instance, rather than syn(x) + y how is that not significant whitespace?
  • tordek 15y ago
    But that makes no sense, it is whitespace, and it has semantic significance (hence being significant). Whitespace was not significant in older versions of Fortran, and that allowed you to write DO30I=10,100 which was interpreted as DO 30 I = 10, 100 An amusing bug I saw in Expert C Programming mentioned how somebody once typed e dot instead of a comma, and DO 30 I = 10. 100 ended up interpreted as a simple real assignment: DO30I = 10.1
• rayiner 15y ago
  He has a point. Whitespace is definitely significant to C's lexer, if not it's parser. When people say "significant whitespace" they're implicitly talking about "implicitly significant to the parser as well as the lexer."