Another salvo in the indentation war? I hope not.

Will Rose cwr at
Mon May 29 17:32:39 CEST 2000

Martijn Faassen <m.faassen at> wrote:
: Philip 'Yes, that's my address' Newton <nospam.newton at> wrote:
: [snip]
:>> If-malicious-somebody's-start-removing-stuff-all-code-is-lost-ly yours,

:> However, removing indentation is more common than removing random
:> characters such as '{' or '}' (or, with Pascal, 'BEGIN'), wouldn't you
:> agree? For example, if someone writes HTML without remember that two or
:> more spaces get treated as one?

:> We're talking about what happens in real life. Indentation is more often
:> smashed than characters are lost.

: That's true, but in real life I haven't seen much indentation smashing of
: Python source yet. Source code is usually transmitted in more durable
: formats; after all if you smash the indentation in C you might get something
: still compilable, but not something very readable. And the thing about source
: code is that it should be human-readable, otherwise we can just as well
: transmit binaries.

It's not a problem with C unless you are trying to patch code and check
the results; otherwise, you just feed the C code through indent to get
your preferred style.  I do that with most code anyway.

However, it's not a major problem with Python, either.  If you are moving
Python code through some system that roaches whitespace (a lot of news
systems used to) just uuencode it (or use MIME?).

cwr at

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