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Comment by Georgelemental | Hacker News Reader

Indentation based is a pain when copy-pasting between contexts with different indentation levels, as you have to fix it up manually, which is error-prone. In languages without it, you can just auto-format. (And even in an editor that doesn't support that, having a second indicator makes it less error-prone to fix manually)

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> have to fix it up manually

Any editor written or actively maintained in the current century does this automatically for you. (Yes that obviously includes Emacs and Vim).

But that doesn't work if the indentation carries semantic meaning; you can't change the indentation without changing the meaning. Maybe you can correct syntactically-incorrect spacing (e.g. change 3 spaces to 4 spaces), but not much beyond that.

The Vim I use increases the indent of a code block when I ask it to. Just like it places a closing curly brace at the point where I tell it to. I don't see the fundamental difference between these two things.

But you have to ask it to, and by the right amount for every line/sub-block. If you accidentally get one line wrong, it could be a silent bug. In a language without significant indentation, as long as braces are preserved, once you are done moving code around a single autoformat will fix everything including nested blocks. And if you forget a brace, it's an error instead of a silent bug

In gdb? It's a shame gdb picked python

no, they can't in indentation based languages. changing indentation implies changing the code. A formatter isn't allowed to do that

>copy-pasting

Underappreciated benefit of side benefit of indentation based languages: no copy-pasta.

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