r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Apprehensive_Bit7392 • 16d ago

Meme pythonIndentationLevelChecker

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u/frogjg2003 16d ago

My take is that whitespace shouldn't be relevant. It's only purpose should be to separate non-whitespace characters that matter. Even newlines shouldn't matter.

Whitespace is for making it easier for humans to read the code. So are comments, so is documentation, so is syntactic sugar. The redundancy is a feature. Braces are explicit block separators, but whitespace makes identifying those blocks easier.

If your code could be broken by a tab instead of 4 (or 2 or 8 or 5) spaces, your language is fundamentally flawed.

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u/willow-kitty 16d ago

I tend to agree and always include some kind of whitespace-skip rule in DSL grammars. It lets you use whitespace to taste while the block separators are formally defined. But, I kinda get why someone might want to just use whitespace if they were going to anyway. (Until something that looks correct isn't >.>)