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Programming languages shouldn't even consider whitespace (except perhaps new lines) syntactically important at all, so the whole discussion is silly. Once you've decided whitespace is important you might as well make emoji part of the syntax.


I disagree: if we make languages have NWS (Non-optional WhiteSpace) then we can easily disambiguate between:

  let traversed-distance := yard-length;
And:

  let traversed-distance := yard - length;
Which is valuable as kebab-case is best case.


Why not? Making identation part of the syntax allows more for less?


You cannot cut and paste freely when indentation matter


Yes ok, but this is not very limiting and doesn't make this approach a ridiculous and failed one to start with, as the OP originally suggested and those languages which do it disprove already?


Because indentation-based languages have very limited formatting they can do. They can't do any indentation formatting.




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