About as many carriage returns as I use in natural language. The act of inserting any sort of punctuation seems inherently approximate; an attempt to encode tha

About as many carriage returns as I use in natural language. The act of inserting any sort of punctuation seems inherently approximate; an attempt to encode that which is usually transmitted in tone, rhythm, body language. People, even before computers, invented several different types of formal logic notation just so that they'd have a language that was better suited to these sorts of puzzles. I don't think that code is a good approximation of natural language, nor do I think that it should try to be. Natural language is very poorly suited to expressing layers of abstraction, and even basic logical relationships. Of course it's easier to write programs that resemble natural language, just as it's also easier to speak than it is to write Vx[Yx->...etc...] but that doesn't mean it's the best way to look at a problem. # But that's a bit besides the point. You can do it however you like, even with whitespace if that's your preference. The key is that the IDE has to be aware of the meaning of your code. Python's solution to that is to assert by fiat that the white space should be a syntactically meaningful unit in this sense, but it could be anything. If you have the information there, then people can look at it and write it however they please.