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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I do not particularly like the lack of brackets everywhere. I think it is hard to know precedence perfectly and brackets ensure you do not make stupid mistakes.

Also there is the classic issue where you take an if statement that has a line one expression and you add a second line, but now because it didn't have brackets (and you are not using indentation style), you just introduced a bug. Or you have an if statement with an expression and you comment out the expression but not the if, then your next statement is now the if conditional expression, which is not obvious.

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But we are using indentation style; that's one of the major design principles. In Civet, the body of an "if" can be multiple lines, and it's clear (from indentation) what they're nested under. Also, the body of an "if" statement can be empty, so if you comment out the body, the "if" doesn't apply to anything else. (This is an improvement over Python, which requires non-empty bodies, even if just to say "pass".)

I think there's a reason that Python is among the most popular programming languages, and part of it is the indentation-based syntax and lack of brackets. The core of Civet's syntax (originally inspired by CoffeeScript) is like a combination of JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, the two/three most popular programming languages.

But also, if you like brackets, you can include them! Most JavaScript/TypeScript code is also valid Civet. Just use the features you like.

>I think there's a reason that Python is among the most popular programming languages, and part of it is the indentation-based syntax and lack of brackets.

Perhaps, but IMO that will then be because it looks tempting at first glance like YAML. No matter how much Python I write, I never learned to enjoy this and the fact that I can't select inside/around brackets to quickly manipulate a scope is just so frustrating.

Python used an indentation-based syntax from the beginning and its syntax is particularly optimized for that. In particular, any block statement (formally, a statement followed by a "suite") would end with `:` and that's effectively the only place where a dangling `:` can happen [1], so you can easily recognize such statement from any directions.

In comparison, at least some people would find CoffeeScript and Civet to be hard to read because they solely rely on left-bearing indents. If my eye is pointing to the rightmost column and scanning to left, I wouldn't be sure about any nature of the line until the very first token and thus preceding indent is reached. This problem is not unique but can be somehow alleviated with some tweaks to the syntax. Ruby `if` for example is also prone to this issue but an explicit `end` token keeps it on track in most cases. CoffeeScript did nothing.

[1] The only other case is `lambda ...:` in parenthesized expressions. `lambda` in Python is quite exceptional in its syntax after all...

Sorry, I did misunderstood. I apologize and thanks for the clarification.

I didn't realize Civet is indentation-based like Python. That isn't so bad.

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