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Yeah, if anything, python worsens the situation. I had a friend DOS our server because he accidentally inserted a tab, causing the illusion that one statement w

Yeah, if anything, python worsens the situation. I had a friend DOS our server because he accidentally inserted a tab, causing the illusion that one statement was inside a block but was actually outside it. He swore off python at that point. I personally avoid the language, but I understand due to issues like that these days mixing tabs and spaces is an error (or is it just a warning?) by default. Regardless, still pretty silly to me to have whitespace play such a major significant role, besides the fact that I find it visually harder to read, like text without punctuation or capitalisation.

secstate 3y ago
Mixing tabs and spaces usually throws a runtime exception. I'm not gonna make a value judgement about that, but your story doesn't make sense based on how I understand py3 Edit, sorry, shoulda read your whole commebt before replying
- capitainenemo 3y ago
  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.
  - _visgean 3y ago
    Never had this happen, this is largely eliminated by using tools like black or other autoformatters.
    - eru 3y ago
      And/or linters. This issue is no worse that having multiple different variables that look the same and only in their obscure same-looking unicode symbols. A linter can handle this. As can a decent font, or editor settings.
    - MrDresden 3y ago
      The point still stands that this is an inherit possibility in the language it self.
      - eru 3y ago
        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'.
        worik 3y ago
        > Well, in C the visual indentation and the meaning of the code (given by {}) can diverge. How?
        eru 3y ago
        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. See also https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/16530 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/16530
        worik 3y ago
        I see. Yes I class that as a bug in the original C specification
        eru 3y ago
        But you either make visual indentation significant, or you risk having a discrepancy between visual indentation and what the language sees.
    - probably_wrong 3y ago
      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.
  - heavenlyblue 3y ago
    You can enable showing whitespace characters in your editor, in PyCharm they are visualised perfectly well as to not distract from the non-whitespace.
  - deanishe 3y ago
    > 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.
    - capitainenemo 3y ago
      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.
katbyte 3y ago
white space as a delimiter is why i never use python.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  > white space as a delimiter is why i never use python. Whitespace is a delimiter in (almost?) all languages humans use. Whitespace determining which scope you’re in is one of the many problems of making whitespace significant, which might be what you meant.
  - tomoyoirl 3y ago
    “The thing that controls scope is the count of certain nonprinting characters, which happen to come in multiple widths” is reasonably insane, yes
    - eru 3y ago
      Which non-printing characters are you talking about? Whitespace characters are very much printable. Yes, I agree that Python should just forbid tabs. As a second best, you can tell your linter (and/or formatter) to forbid tabs (and any weird unicode whitespace). That's basically the equivalent of compiling your C with -Wall.
      - takeda 3y ago
        This was an issue in Python 2, where for some dumb reason it allowed mixing tabs and spaces and equated tab to 8 spaces (I think). Python 3 doesn't have that issue.
        capitainenemo 3y ago
        Of course, if one was coding an exploit, one could still use python2. It is still commonly available due to a long tail of legacy scripts and in some cases (like a script I use routinely but didn't write) the difficulty of porting it to python3 (I've asked over a dozen pythonistas over the years, they kept running into same problems)
raverbashing 3y ago
Yes mixing tabs and spaces is a big no no and rightfully throws an error now
- worik 3y ago
  Not an improvement Tabs still have syntactical meaning and are still invisible Python will never be a success, I predict, because of this Trust me
fragmede 3y ago
humans are weird creatures sometimes. there was this bad thing that happened that won't happen again now, but now I can't use the thing forever because Reasons.

secstate 3y ago

Mixing tabs and spaces usually throws a runtime exception. I'm not gonna make a value judgement about that, but your story doesn't make sense based on how I understand py3 Edit, sorry, shoulda read your whole commebt before replying

capitainenemo 3y ago
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.
- _visgean 3y ago
  Never had this happen, this is largely eliminated by using tools like black or other autoformatters.
  - eru 3y ago
    And/or linters. This issue is no worse that having multiple different variables that look the same and only in their obscure same-looking unicode symbols. A linter can handle this. As can a decent font, or editor settings.
  - MrDresden 3y ago
    The point still stands that this is an inherit possibility in the language it self.
    - eru 3y ago
      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'.
      - worik 3y ago
        > Well, in C the visual indentation and the meaning of the code (given by {}) can diverge. How?
        eru 3y ago
        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. See also https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/16530 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/16530
        worik 3y ago
        I see. Yes I class that as a bug in the original C specification
        eru 3y ago
        But you either make visual indentation significant, or you risk having a discrepancy between visual indentation and what the language sees.
  - probably_wrong 3y ago
    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.
- heavenlyblue 3y ago
  You can enable showing whitespace characters in your editor, in PyCharm they are visualised perfectly well as to not distract from the non-whitespace.
- deanishe 3y ago
  > 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.
  - capitainenemo 3y ago
    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.

katbyte 3y ago

white space as a delimiter is why i never use python.

naikrovek 3y ago
> white space as a delimiter is why i never use python. Whitespace is a delimiter in (almost?) all languages humans use. Whitespace determining which scope you’re in is one of the many problems of making whitespace significant, which might be what you meant.
- tomoyoirl 3y ago
  “The thing that controls scope is the count of certain nonprinting characters, which happen to come in multiple widths” is reasonably insane, yes
  - eru 3y ago
    Which non-printing characters are you talking about? Whitespace characters are very much printable. Yes, I agree that Python should just forbid tabs. As a second best, you can tell your linter (and/or formatter) to forbid tabs (and any weird unicode whitespace). That's basically the equivalent of compiling your C with -Wall.
    - takeda 3y ago
      This was an issue in Python 2, where for some dumb reason it allowed mixing tabs and spaces and equated tab to 8 spaces (I think). Python 3 doesn't have that issue.
      - capitainenemo 3y ago
        Of course, if one was coding an exploit, one could still use python2. It is still commonly available due to a long tail of legacy scripts and in some cases (like a script I use routinely but didn't write) the difficulty of porting it to python3 (I've asked over a dozen pythonistas over the years, they kept running into same problems)

raverbashing 3y ago

Yes mixing tabs and spaces is a big no no and rightfully throws an error now

worik 3y ago
Not an improvement Tabs still have syntactical meaning and are still invisible Python will never be a success, I predict, because of this Trust me

fragmede 3y ago

humans are weird creatures sometimes. there was this bad thing that happened that won't happen again now, but now I can't use the thing forever because Reasons.