[jcranmer]

Agglutinative languages would probably work as well as isolating languages, since they tend to work by just shoving things on the end of words rather than inflecting them. It does potentially raise a segmentation problem, but I'm not really sufficiently familiar with any agglutinative language to know how hard a problem it is in practice.

The difficult languages are inflectional languages, where you make things completely different instead of just tacking something on the end.

It's worth pointing out that all whitespace is completely optional in Fortran, the first programming language--doi=0,10 is exactly the same as DO I = 0, 10. So it's not like early computing relied heavily on gratuitous whitespace.