RE: RE: [RFC] Draft Proposal for New Python Syntax

s.k.johnston.bra0801@oasis.icl.co.uk
Thu, 26 May 94 15:48:14 BST

I am a Modula-3/Oberon-2/C++/Modula-2 programmer (professionaly,
and in that order), and a user of perl and python. I got pyhton
0.99.8 to work under OS/2, and although slow I used it quite a
bit. I am having trouble with the 1.0 makefiles right now.

Back to the syntax argument, I like the syntax as it is, th *only*
thing I would like to see changed is the ability to accept blank
lines, ie in C/C++ my personal formatting rule is that after any
if/while/for/switch etc I add a blank line, thus:

if (a == 1) {

while (a < 10) {

a++;
}
}

This makes these flow statements stand out. What I would like to
do is to type:

if a = 0:

while a < 10:

a = a + 1;

The parser would have to ignore completely blank lines, if this
where for example a function then the next 'def' (starting at
column 0) would terminate it in exactly the same way.

What I suggest is that whitespace before statements becomes more
important, while blank lines become almost context sensitive. As a
programmer this would solve my biggest gripe about python, ie that
I can find it difficult to read as it can become very cramped.
Currently I am looking at using an embedded language for a UNIX
based system, and believe it or not this problem of blank lines
has not only convinced me, but my customers also, to discount
python and look elsewhere (tcl probably) for the language. Now I
would prefer to use python and it's objects for the project so
please, not too many changes please, but soon if they are going to
happen !!

Thanks for reading my (probably disjointed) thoughts.

MODULE Sig;
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