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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

Mixing tabs and spaces usually throws a runtime exception. I'm not gonna make a value judgement about that, but your story doesn't make sense based on how I understand py3

Edit, sorry, shoulda read your whole commebt before replying

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Yep. It was a few years ago while that was stilled allowed (as I'd noted ;) ) but regardless. Significant whitespace is just annoying.. There's a lot of things that render as whitespace, and source code one might be reviewing could be printed wrapped or copied and pasted in odd ways. Other languages are more robust to this.

Never had this happen, this is largely eliminated by using tools like black or other autoformatters.

And/or linters.

This issue is no worse that having multiple different variables that look the same and only in their obscure same-looking unicode symbols.

A linter can handle this. As can a decent font, or editor settings.

The point still stands that this is an inherit possibility in the language it self.

Well, in C the visual indentation and the meaning of the code (given by {}) can diverge. That's even worse, and happens in practice. Many style guidelines for C have evolved specifically to address that problem with 'the language itself'.

> Well, in C the visual indentation and the meaning of the code (given by {}) can diverge.

How?

The compiler doesn't check your indentation at all. (OK, not true, these days you get warnings for misleading indentation.) But here's an example of misleading indentation in C:

    if(some condition)
        do something; {
        do something else;
    }
    do another thing;

You can stretch 'some condition' out over multiple lines and have some more parents inside of it, to make it more confusing.

I see.

Yes

I class that as a bug in the original C specification

But you either make visual indentation significant, or you risk having a discrepancy between visual indentation and what the language sees.

> But you either make visual indentation significant...

That would be Python. I do not like it, which does not mean it is bad, it is a matter of taste

The alternative is you say "blocks are delimited by {}"

`if(foo) bar` should be invalid

`if(foo){bar}` is OK by me. Worik's tick of approval

(Neither is valid C I think)

> That would be Python.

Not necessarily. In practice, in C-as-actually-used people (should) set up linters and formatters, so that you can rely on indentation.

When programming, this means that you can behave as if both curly braces and indentation are significant, and you get an error when they are out-of-sync.

I think its more of an tooling issue. If your editor / diff viewer cant differentiate between different whitespaces get a better one. Also if you want to ensure some function isnt in local scope etc just test it.

I feel that the main point still stands, though. Saying that Python doesn't have a whitespace problem because you can send the code through a tool that detects whitespace-related problems still acknowledges the existence of said problem.

You can enable showing whitespace characters in your editor, in PyCharm they are visualised perfectly well as to not distract from the non-whitespace.

> There's a lot of things that render as whitespace

Like what? As you note, mixing tabs and spaces is now an error.

I've never understood the objection to semantic whitespace. Complaining about having to indent code correctly strikes me as being akin to complaining about having to pee in the toilet instead of the bathtub.

there is a huge difference between having a coding standard (handled easily by a linter on commit in most languages) and making a particular whitespace indentation a critical language feature.

Bonus, if there's a good reason to change the linter format, you can do so. Rust handles this rather well I think.

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