[maninalift]

Surely the key point is that most of us read indentation first, it doesn't matter whether you are witting C with semicolons and curlies or ruby with no semicolons and "end"s or lisp with parens, what the programmer really reads first is the indentation. Those other things are sometimes checked afterwards.

Therefore there are two reasonable courses of action to prevent this kind of problem:

  * use automatic code indentation
  * use a whitespace significant language

The second is absolutely the better choice. You may disagree but you are wrong. This is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of programming language syntax actually reflecting what the programmer reads.

[matthewmacleod]

That's just not the whole story. Significant whitespace can itself cause issues - for example, it can be really easy to accidentally indent to the wrong depth when merging or copying and pasting Python code.

Ultimately, well-formed indentation and whitespace is important, as you say. But whitespace significance is not a panacea.

[marcosdumay]

Well, personally I don't like whitespace significance... But then, I wonder if forbidding spaces* at the beginning of the lines wouldn't correct all the problems.

* Yes, mandatory tabs. I know lots and lots of people will disagree, those lots and lots of people are wrong. Spaces are ambiguous, and have different semantics on different context. In a flexible language that does not make much difference, but when you want whitespace to have a specific meaning, it does.