> 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.
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.