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by KptMarchewa 39 days ago
This is a 00s POV. If you spend any time on syntax formatting in 2026, you're wasting it. It's a solved problem.

Any reasonable language with braces has standard formatter that will just put each brace level on a different whitespace level.

1 comments

Yes, and so will any reasonable text editor automatically indent to the most likely position, and remove an entire indentation level with backspace, and substitute spaces for tabs per community standards, and keep everything lined up neatly.

But GGP was making a claim about the braces themselves solving the problem, and they clearly do not. The indentation automatically inserted by your tooling solves the problem. And it's at least as easy to communicate the intended block structure with colons and backspaces as with open braces and close braces, plus it doesn't waste lines (or invite bikeshedding) for the closing braces.