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by gnufx 2042 days ago
If you haven't read Landin's "The Next 700 Programming Languages", you should. I don't know if it's still outside the ACM paywall, but you'll find it in a web search if not. It introduced the offside rule -- not actually what Python has -- inspired by mathematical notation. Note "it can be mixed freely with [...] punctuation" (e.g. Haskell). The paper talks about "physical representations", relevant to syntax highlighting mentioned below (or "fontification" in Emacs, reminiscent of typefaces in the publication language of ALGOL).
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I just finished reading it the other day: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf I got there from Erik Meijer's excellent "Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman: Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell": http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72....