3 ms·
Donald Knuth: Using Indentation to Represent Program Structure
- jsnx 19y agoThe objection that, in the midst of a long document, telling what level of indentation one is at would be difficult is easily addressed by having the editor show space marks or using 'fold lines' in print -- neither of which is difficult. In practice, though, I never have any problem with indentation based syntax, because change in indentation is easy enough to detect, and that's good enough for anything I've ever had to read.
- bayareaguy 19y agoWhen I work in Python, I find I need to use emacs' support for rectangle editing frequently when rearranging nested blocks.
- anamax 19y agoIndentation is merely horizontal positional information. The idea of using position to convey information is very old - music is written using vertical position information.