On 2015-02-03, Tim Streater wrote:

In article , Adam Funk
wrote:
On 2015-02-01, wrote:

I also dislike python, although it has its uses (and a wide variety of
special purpose libraries). However, in case you consider it a useful
piece of information, note that the Physics dept at Imperial College
teaches python in first year physics.

The significance of whitespace still bugs me, ...

Whitespace should *not* be significant; there are no other contexts in
life in which it is. This idea is just a throwback to the days of
FORTRAN.

Well, there are two ways of looking at that. I actually used FORTRAN
(maybe we called it Fortran by then; I'm not sure) in the late 1980s,
& often ran into syntax errors caused by overtyping past column 72.

OTOH, "Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom
about the tenth century A. D., and lasted until about 1957, when
FORTRAN abandoned the practice." It used to be the case that if you
called a variable DODO, the compiler would parse it as DO DO & your
program would be dead as a....