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Comment by improbable22 | Hacker News Reader

It's not so pretty, but what are the alternatives? Making indentation meaningful has downsides (copy-pasting can go very wrong) and using up ascii characters just for this means they can't do other things (like Vector{Int} type parameters) and still often takes up a line.

You can avoid it quite a bit, e.g. f(x,y) = (z=x+y; sqrt(z)) defines a function, with two statements separated by ;.

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I think the C/C++ convention with curly braces is ok, and doesn't make the parser much more complicated. Any closing brace has an obvious matching opening brace. And the meaning of any opening brace can be easily deduced from context, I suppose.

Personally, I much prefer end to braces.

They have the benefit also of being usable for indexing and array expressions

Other things are OK too. I quite like that if/elseif/else/end only needs one closing, no other openings.

I don't know whether using {} for both types & blocks would be hard to parse, maybe it's possible. I have heard & can believe that parsing <> as a 4th ascii bracket is pretty tricky.

I have heard & can believe that parsing <> as a 4th ascii bracket is pretty tricky.

That's probably because < can appear without >, e.g. in a<b.

While I like do...end for symmetry, most of the time the end will have the same indentation as whatever opened it, and everything in between will be one indentation ahead (especially if you're using an automatic formatter), so I can follow easily without reading the content. And whatever opened it will also explicitly tell the context (if it's a method definition, if/else, for...).

In the end my code ends up like python but with an extra end, which, while adding a possibly unnecessary line of code it at least makes it trivial to copy and paste something into the repl (or other part of the code) without worrying about indentation.

Julia uses `end` because it is derived from MATLAB which also uses `end`, it's not to save ASCII characters.

AFAIK it is the opposite of what you have said. And although Julia has a lot of inspiration of Matlab syntax, it is absolutely not derived from it. https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/

There are many fine languages that have used `end` to delimit blocks, including: Pascal — an elegant, classic language (and my first, personally); Ruby — another gem (get it). And yes, also Matlab, which is hardly unique in this respect.

Right, but Julia is not derived from Ruby or Pascal.

Julia isn't derived from Matlab either and was influenced as much by Ruby as by Matlab.

> derive: base a concept on an extension or modification of (another concept).

Obviously I didn't mean the implementation was based on MATLAB because that would be impossible.

Then why does MATLAB do it?

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