The programming languages Python and Haskell both use whitespace -
specifically, indentation - in meaningful ways, for example:
for foo in bar:
print foo
print bar
in Python does something quite different to
for foo in bar:
print foo
print bar
Some people really can't stand this; I don't see how it's any worse
than using curly braces {} myself (e.g.
for foo in bar {
print foo
}
print bar
versus
for foo in bar {
print foo
print bar
}
)
The most egregious use of whitespace in any machine-readable syntax
has to be the GNU Makefile format, in which a tab at the left margin
has a completely different meaning to four spaces.
Dominic
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