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Whitespace delimiters suck

Roy Smith roy at popmail.med.nyu.edu
Fri Jan 21 09:51:04 EST 2000 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net> wrote:
> Yeah, right. You dont honestly believe all of those languages are
> white-space tolerant ? In C (or C++), what does this mean:
> 
> y+++x;
> 
> Is that y++ + x, or y + ++x ? If you add whitespace, the compiler will do
> something different.

That's not what people are complaining about.  C uses whitespace as a token 
delimter.  It's needed when leaving it out would result in an ambigious parse, 
and if you use it, any arbitrary contigious string of whitespace characters 
makes up a single delimter.  There is never any time (outside of a quoted 
string) when substituting any non-null combination of spaces, tabs, and newlines 
with any other non-null combination of spaces, tabs, and newlines will alter the 
meaning of a program.

That's a far cry from confusion about how many spaces a tab is equal to leading 
to syntacticaly correct but semanticaly incorrect programs.

Even SQL, which has to be the most wart-infested language syntax I've ever seen, 
gets this right :-)

-- 
Roy Smith <roy at popmail.med.nyu.edu>
New York University School of Medicine
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