White space vs. text for program structuring

[Bill Frantz]

At 11:40 AM 9/28/1999 -0700, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
>On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>> 
>> As long as we're talking syntax design, I'll go ahead and revive an old 
>> question: Ping especially has long advocated that E adopt Python's use of 
>> indentation rather than curly brackets for block structure.
>
>That's a bit stronger than i would have described my position.  I do
>indeed like the visual simplicity of Python which is due to the lack
>of curly braces, but the argument that E needs braces to be a decent
>command-line language seems quite sound.  Although Python programs
>are beautiful to read, they're troublesome to enter interactively.

Since people use the two dimensional appearance and (most) languages use
one dimensional token parsing to determine program structure, there is more
than enough room for error to creep in.  I have always thought that warning
diagnostics for situations where the two methods give different structures
would be useful.