[erlang-questions] separators before end

[Minsloc Tarren]

a three in one package.

On 9/20/07, David Terrell <dbt@REDACTED> wrote:
> And I've encountered people who refuse to use erlang because of the
> atom/Variable thing.  Teaching your brain to be able to switch idioms
> is good for it.  I suggest you try it more often.

i learned a lot of languages, in no particular order : basic,
assembly, c, c++, c#, pascal, ruby, smalltalk, common lisp,
javascript, php, lush (something between scheme and mathematica) and
probablly a few i forgot about ;-)).

i also toyed with others (rebol, forth, self, io, brainfuck & friends
if you call those languages and lots of others). I even had to endure
fixing a few python scripts and some java code (yes, it included
checking a ton of XML files). blech.

someone started a new thread off this one - I would never use python
(was: separators before end) - and i asked there, what people think
learning python would give me. so if you have a suggestion, answer
there.

On 9/20/07, David Mercer <dmercer@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> I agree.  That sort of thinking has kept Lisp out of the mainstream.  All

in lisp, all those parentheses serve a very good purpose. it's about
what you consider a good trade-off (i'd be willing to write twice as
much parentheses for what lisp offers, but what does python offer to
me ?).

On 9/21/07, David King <dking@REDACTED> wrote:
> True, but there is no way to turn that off. My point was that Ruby
> forces a particular whitespace use. For instance, this won't work:

> a=a+1;
> b=b+2;
> c=5;

> d= a
> +b
> +c;

> Even though, stylistically, this programmer has chosen to end lines
> in semicolons, he's still bitten by Ruby's significant whitespace.

that never came to me as fault, its a logical conclusion that comes
from the fact that ";" is optional, so it never bitten me. i think
that its even explained in specs (if there is no sign that the
expression is not terminated, like an operator on the end of the line,
or un-closed parenthesis, the parser has no way to tell that the
expression should continue on the next line ...), for christ's sake.
so what ?

are you going to indent just two spaces in python and cry that "it
doesn't work" ??? you indented it, didn't you  ? ;-)))

ruby strikes me as elegant, python as ugly. i'm asking in other thread
whether there is something i would learn from python (other than
learning another scripting lang of which i know a bunch already), and
only that would force me to overcome my hatred for for python (i know
it's kinda childish, but as i have no use for python, there is no need
for compromises ...)

2 everybody> and even if i would learned something new from python, i
still would view the choice of using whitespace as block delimiters as
idiotic. indentation is something that can be achieved automatically
because of syntactic rules, not something that should be part of
syntax imho.