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PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

The whitespace brigade

Syntactically significant whitespace is one of those debating points frequently raised in unproductive language thrashes involving Python. One persistent implication made by SSW-haters is that it's a freakish mutation unique to Python. Or, if they're feeling particularly vicious, they'll bring up Fortran. Cold comfort.

In fact, there are quite a few other languages that have gone down this path. Flipping through a big fat book that I bought because Steve Yegge recommended it, I came across mention of a couple that were new to me. Then I went digging for more. Here's an incomplete list:

In my searches I came across the term "off-side-rule languages", which I hadn't heard before, though apparently some people use it. I think it's a clunker. And "syntactically significant whitespace" is too much of a mouthful, and imprecise to boot (after all, whitespace between tokens is fairly significant!).

I think the field is open for a zippy marketing term. How about Spacejax? Space 2.0? Hmm, this is harder than I thought...

Monday, January 8th, 2007
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3 comments

Some related posts: The Language I Will Kind of Learn in 2008: Smalltalk • Understanding tuples vs. lists in Python • Array comprehensions in Javascript • Neat Python hack: infix operators • Enforcing Style • The twenty-minute trouble ticket system • "Reverse" game update -- my language safari • Let's play a game: BASIC vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. PHP • Ajaxy regex tester in Python: retest • CodeZoo
• Comment from Andrew, later that day

new buzz words are hard to come up with, but one of the rules is that you can't reuse parts of other terms. (i.e. spacejax => space + 'ajax'[1:]). It's often common to create an acronym (i.e. ajax). That said, i nominate LUSS => 'Languages Using Significant Spacing'

• Comment from Jeremy, 1 day later

I don't know how you gathered your data, but neither SML nor OCaml have any more significant whitespace than a language like C. So listing "ML" as a whitespace-signficant language is wrong.

• Comment from Paul, 1 day later

Not sure how ML ended up in there; I've removed it. Thanks for the heads-up.

As for "the whitespace thing for OCaml", try following the link!

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