[chipsy]

Significant whitespace is _also_ redundant, just along different metrics. Badly indented Python gets caught before execution the majority of the time, and in presentation, it surfaces to the programmer quickly.

His argument is essentially against something like Lisp or Forth where you have such a paucity of syntax that many erroneously written statements are syntactically valid and make it to runtime.

[cwp]

Lisp and Forth are the extreme case, which is especially bad, because you get no error message at all.

But the middle ground are languages that can detect a syntax error, but can't figure out exactly what it is. You don't get an error message saying "You should have a semi-colon here, want me to insert one?" Instead you get some vague message like "didn't expect this keyword here" a few lines after the missing semi-colon.