Communications of the ACM
Sanity vs. Invisible Markings
Dear KV,
My team resurrected some old Python code and brought it up to version 3. The process was made worse by the new restriction of not mixing tabs and spaces in the source code. An automatic cleanup that allowed the code to execute by replacing the tabs with spaces caused a lot of havoc with the comments at the ends of lines. Why does anyone make a language in which white space matters this much?
Comments
Gunnar Wolf
You say in your article, Allowing any two symbols to represent the same concept, for example, is a definite no-no. This brought up a memory of a case where contradicting your advice was actually an improvement.
Many years ago, I learnt a Lisp dialect where the syntactical meaning of parentheses, brackets and brackets was identical they only were required to match (that is, no bracket could close a parenthesis). This _did_ improve on readability/maintainability of programs, as it allows to better spot where in a deep s-expression you were working.
Of course, bringing Lisp to any discussion on readability feels like cheating. In Lisp it's too common to drown in the layers upon layers of "toenail clippings".
The only worse offender than Lisp would be, of course, the "Whitespace" programming language, which introduces the novelty that any non-whitespace character is considered to be a comment, and the language definition consists of combinations of spaces, tabs and newlines. Yes, naturally, Whitespace proudly occupies a spot as an "esoteric programming language", useful for proving a point and setting up programming challenges, but nothing beyond that.
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