IEEE Life Fellow

1 minute read

Of course this is subjective, but having dealt with many different programming languages from Fortran (ugh), through Basic, Forth (!!) to Pascal, and C(++); there always seeemed to be aspects of syntax that frankly made no sense and were just accepted, all be it begrudgingly. I cannot say how many times the I have had the C compiler flag a missing semi colon. Even half a brain could see that it is at the end of a line and is almost certainly the end of a statement.

Anyway the syntax of Python is both compact and to me sensible. Even the unconventional idea that white space serves a purpose is useful. Almost all other languages that ignore white space end up with some convention of using white space to distinguish code blocks, each with a variety of styles. By requiring white space, it forces a uniform style, cuts out all the extraneous curly brackets, begin .. ends and the like; producing compact understandable code. Also there is no credible grounds to compain about whether to use tabs or what number of spaces, all the compitent editors handle this with ease. Full marks to Guido for out of the box thinking.

Then don’t forget that Readability Counts.

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