On Tuesday 01 February 2022 at 17:55:30, Nikolaus Klepp via Dng wrote:

> Anno domini 2022 Tue, 1 Feb 11:44:37 -0500 Steve Litt scripsit:
> >
> > In the hands of anything but a very careful and security-knowledgeable
> > programmer, writing Python3 is more secure than writing C. You could
> > think of Python3 as C with seatbelts and airbags, and a heck of an
> > inefficient transmission.
>
> When it comes to this, I still prefer Scheme/Lisp seatbelts and airbags.
> But that's most likely because I have a grey beard and the first "high
> level" languages where indentation kicked my butt were fortran and cobol.
> Seeing that resurrected in python is like return of the living dead ...

I concur totally :)

I, too, have a grey beard (although still containing some dark brown), and I
have written Fortran, and also professionally had to read (although
fortunately not write) Cobol.

I learned Perl and Python at about the same time, in order to try to improve
the efficiency (both create-time and run-time) of my (previously just Bash)
scripts, and I find the indentation-fussiness of Python simply drives me up the
wall.

I regard indentation as something to make things easier to read for people.

Syntactical items such as 'if', 'else', '{' or ';' are for computers to work
out which bits of programming belong together.

Mind you, that said, I these days spend a fair amount of my professional time
writing Asterisk dial plans, whose language strongly reminds of programming in
Basic in the 1980s. It has "Goto" and "Gosub", but no real "If" except for
"GotoIf", and there is no concept at all of "{ ... }".

In the first versions of the language you even had to number the lines of your
code sequentially. Nowadays you can get away with numbering the first line '1'
and then using 'n' for all the rest (but you still have to put it in).


Antony.

--
All generalisations are inaccurate.

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