I use emacs and python-mode. This is not an editor issue. It's more fundamental than that. The problem is this:
block:
stmt1
stmt2
stmt3
stmt4
stmt5
If your indenting gets screwed up for ANY reason there is not enough information left to reconstruct it. There is enough information reconstruct the indent at stmt1 (thanks to the colon, which is essentially equivalent to a left curly brace), but not enough to reconstruct the outdent at stmt4. There are many, many ways for indentation to get screwed up.
But to reiterate masklin's point, in C/etc, if your braces get screwed up for ANY reason there is not enough information left to reconstruct them. So what's the difference between meaningful braces and meaningful indentation?
To that you replied that the output of the Tab key depends on context, and implied that in your editor(s), sometimes the result of the Tab is invisible, and/or cannot be reversed by hitting Delete (or Backspace). And snprbob86 pointed out that in his/her editor (and mine), this isn't a problem. Tab never does anything invisible, and it's always reversible with Backspace. So what's the problem?
And although I assume you noticed this too, just to be clear and err on the side of explicitness, it seems to me that that there're two things going on here. One half is arguing about whether or not there's a fundamental problem with significant indentation that is not present in languages without significant indentation, and the other is an attempt to solve non-fundamental problems that others might have (e.g. complicated state in tabs, possibly due to using a poor editor).
> if your braces get screwed up for ANY reason there is not enough information left to reconstruct them
That's not necessarily true. If my code is indented, then I can reconstruct the braces from the indentation. Also, it's a lot easier to inadvertently screw up whitespace than a brace because there are so many more things out there in the digital world (HTML, autoindent) that muck around with whitespace than things that muck around with braces.
The right answer is to SPECIFY block structure using braces (or something equivalent), but then RENDER the block structure using (automatically generated) indentation. It's perfectly fine for the compiler to complain if they don't match. This is one case where redundancy is a feature, not a bug.
If you hate braces and love whitespace so much, why are you not urging Guido to get rid of the colon? It's essentially equivalent to an open brace. Why is an open brace more pythonic than a close brace?
> using a poor editor
I use emacs, but just to see if maybe I'm missing something I fired up vim and tried editing some Python code. AFAICT vim (at least out of the box on Snow Leopard) is not aware of Python syntax at all.
