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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

I tend to be wary of semantic white space. It is so easy for some tool or function to screw up your white space and you have a huge change in meaning that may or may not be visually apparent. I tend to prefer having characters like braces or parentheses (s expressions) denote the tree level and white space purely as non-semantic pretty printing.

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I can see both sides of the sematic whitespace arguments, but CSV intentionally uses commas as delimiter to avoid the problems caused by using white-space as a delimiter. I'd rather use something that required delimiters (json, s-expr), or one that didn't (YAML, indented TSV) over an odd mix of the two.

CSV uses commas to avoid the problems of using whitespace for column delimiters, but it still uses whitespace for row delimiters. It's already an odd mix of the two.

What I think was a mistake in the past was using 2 or 4 spaces (or tabs) for semantic indentation. I think it should be 1 space, like Comma-Separated Trees has above, and have the editor indicate the indentation level. In my experience this eliminates a common source of tool-caused indentation bugs.

Is this not usually how it works? Other than Makefiles, every language with significant whitespace I can think of just treats “more than the previous line” as an indent.

The optionality is the problem. As a tool writer you have to handle a 10x jump in complexity.

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