[dbrueck]

Whitespace is semantically significant in nearly all modern programming languages, the difference is that with Python it is completely significant for both the humans and the tools - it is syntactically significant.

I've actively used Python for a quarter of a century (solo, with small teams, with large teams, and with whole dev orgs) and the number of times that not having redundant block delimiters has caused problems is vanishingly small and, interestingly, is on par with the number of times I've had problems with redundant block delimiters getting out of sync, i.e. some variation of

  if (a > b)
    i++;
    j++;

Anytime I switch from Python to another language for awhile, one of the first annoying things is the need to add braces everywhere, and it really rubs because you are reminded how unnecessary they are.

Anyway, you can always write #end if you'd like. ;-)

[ec109685]

The parent’s point was that you don’t have to care about white space when composing code in other languages since the LSP can auto format. So you could theoretically never press return or space more than once, and always have perfectly correctly functioning and formatted code at the end.

[dbrueck]

Oh, I thoroughly understand the parent's point, I'm just disagreeing that it is a problem that needs to be "addressed".

Most language design decisions involve tradeoffs, and for me this one has been a big positive, and the potential negatives have been - across decades of active usage - almost entirely theoretical.

Also, the real-world use case for importing code and auto formatting it is quite doable with Python - the main thing you can't do is blindly (unintelligently) merge two text buffers and expect it to work every time, but in general it takes only a smidgen of analysis on the incoming text to be able to auto reformat it to match your own. You could go all the way and parse and reformat it as needed, but much simpler/dumber approaches work just as well.

What you can't do is take invalid Python code and expect it to autoformat properly, but that borders on tautological, so... :)

[biorach]

> So you could theoretically never press return or space more than once,

There are people that actually do this?

[saagarjha]

Never commented out a loop or a condition, have you?

[dbrueck]

...yes? Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. :)

(funny enough, that particular scenario is actually harder to miss in Python since it often produces an error that prevents the program from running at all)

[saagarjha]

Ok, let's say I have some code. C:

  some_function();

Python:

  some_function()

I am debugging how this function works so I actually only want it to run when some condition is true. C:

  if (some_condition) {
  some_function();
  }

Python:

  if some_condition:
  some_function()

Oops. That's not indented correctly, so it won't run. To be fair neither actually looks good but that's 1. fine because this is for debugging and 2. for the C code I just format the file and it is instantly fixed. What if I have a loop? C:

  for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
      iteratively_optimize();
  }

Python:

  for i in range(5):
      iteratively_optimize()

Unfortunately this breaks something so I want to step it through. In C I comment out the loop as follows:

  // for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
      iteratively_optimize();
  //}

In Python:

  // for i in range(5):
      iteratively_optimize()

Nope, that's broken too. I can't just autoformat this code either because the formatter can't look at scope using anything else. I have to manually go and fix the indentation on that line too.

These are actually very small cases. I can even imagine you saying, in C you have to fix two places if you want to comment out a loop or if: the opening brace and the closing one. In Python you need to comment out the control statement and the second thing is fixing the indentation, so what's the big deal? Well, as the number of lines in the block grows larger in C it's still just commenting out the two braces, while in Python you have to select the whole region line-perfectly and fix the indentation. As someone who writes both I always find this to be a lot more fiddly and annoying.