> So they replaced the space with a character that is effectively identical I don't think that's the reason. The reason was ease of parsing. It's harder to wri

> So they replaced the space with a character that is effectively identical I don't think that's the reason. The reason was ease of parsing. It's harder to write a token recognizer if spaces are allowed in identifiers and distinguish them from type names and reserved words. ALGOL-68 famously did allow spaces in identifiers, e.g. https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Boustrophedon_transform#ALGOL_68 https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Boustrophedon_transform#ALGOL_6...