On: Show HN: Ki Programming Language

[gavinhoward]

Exactly what I mentioned above: source formatting is just one of the things you can do with braces and not significant whitespace. [1]

Also, forget a brace in your program, just one, and the compiler can tell.

Forget one indentation? No dice.

And while braces can break things too, editor settings can make it much easier to break things with significant whitespace. [2] [3]

Also, refactoring. [4]

Editor stuff. [5]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3296782

[2]: https://medium.com/@rwxrob/significant-whitespace-is-still-t...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24854090

[4]: https://lobste.rs/s/yyuo7f/significant_whitespace_good_bad#c...

[5]: https://lobste.rs/s/yyuo7f/significant_whitespace_good_bad#c...

[xigoi → gavinhoward]

Python does have an auto-formatter [6], so clearly indentation doesn't prevent that.

> Also, forget a brace in your program, just one, and the compiler can tell.

Should we duplicate every character, so the compiler can tell if you leave one out? This is not a radiation-hardened quine [7].

> editor settings can make it much easier to break things with significant whitespace.

Then use an editor which doesn't.

> Selecting all code contained in a brace or a parents is so much easier (in vim the % movement) than if you have to walk lines.

I have a plugin for Neovim that adds indentation-based motions. The implementation is trivial.

[6] https://github.com/psf/black

[7] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/57257/radiation...