why ; ?

[Bill Baxter]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
> news:fvnk34$m27$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Tomasz Sowinski:
>>> I like the version without ; but how can you tell where a block ends 
>>> without braces? indents?
>> Where there is a de-dent.
>> There's a known language that's designed like this ;-)
> 
> Oh man, now you've got me started on one of my pet peeves...
> 
> Semantically-meaningful indentation: That is exactly the reason I truly, 
> truly hate Python (Well, that and a complete lack of variable declarations. 
> Hello, hidden bugs!).
> 
> Python's semantically-meaningful indentation was intended to fix the problem 
> of poorly-indented code by enforcing proper indentation in the language and 
> compiler. But the problem is, it *doesn't* actually enforce it. In fact, it 
> *can't* enforce it because it doesn't have enough information to enforce it. 
> All it really does (and all it's able to do) is run around *assuming* your 
> code is properly indented while silently drawing semantic conclusions from 
> those (obviously not always correct) assumptions.
> 
> In fact it's really the same root problem as "no variable declarations". In 
> both cases, the compiler does nothing but assume that what you wrote is what 
> you meant, thus silently introducing hidden bugs 1. Whenever you didn't 
> *really* want the new variables "my_reponse" and "my_responce" in additon to 
> "my_response" (VB/VBScript coders use "option explicit" *for a reason*), and 
> 2. Whenever you didn't *really* want to break out of that loop/conditional. 

I like Python, but I agree the whitespace structure thing is at best a 
wash.  Not having to type braces does make the code look cleaner, but 
causes other problems.  If there were such a thing as curly-brace 
Python, I'd probably use that.

--bb