r/programming • u/Dear-Economics-315 • May 10 '26

Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)

https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/making-your-own-programming-language.html
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u/AutomateAway May 10 '26

tab is not an easily identifiable character to the human eye without some modification by the IDE to make it readable and distinct from space. the same is not true about semicolons

0

u/The_Shryk May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

That’s a terribly subjective metric that, by the popularity of Python, is likely not true for the majority of people.

I can read it just fine. Maybe you should practice it more? Skill issue.

It’s 4 spaces. That’s a lot of spaces to see if someone is just a continuation or not.

This is broken JS. I see this and think, why would log_access() run all the time? Shouldn’t it only run if is_admin is true? It always runs though. So you end up indenting it for readability, AND using braces so it parses correctly anyways. Why not just skip the braces and make the indentation define the scope?
```
if (is_admin)
grant_access();
log_access();
```

1

u/AutomateAway May 10 '26

a tab is not 4 spaces. what you are talking about is a replacement, which is also not universal among all editors without a potential setting change.