Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Neil Cerutti Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: Language design Date: 18 Sep 2013 14:57:00 GMT Organization: Norwich University Lines: 31 Message-ID: References: <522eb795$0$29999$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <5232e562$0$29988$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net 1sUt07Je1rblGtPlf+oytA9YCgG4khGIuaZ/A1tBcT8hvyUbq4 Cancel-Lock: sha1:hAupjrQFx/IEOZZ1Lm9fh4y1bPc= User-Agent: slrn/0.9.9p1/mm/ao (Win32) Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:54384 On 2013-09-13, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Terry Reedy wrote: >> Poetry, including that in English, often *is* concerned with formatting. >> Code is more like poetry than prose. >> >> >>> You can take this >>> paragraph of text, unwrap it, and then reflow it to any width you >>> like, without materially changing my points. >> >> >> But you cannot do that with poetry! > > Evangelical vicar in want of a portable second-hand font. Would > dispose, for the same, of a portrait, in frame, of the Bishop-elect of > Vermont. > > I think you could quite easily reconstruct the formatting of > that, based on its internal structure. Even in poetry, English > doesn't depend on its formatting nearly as much as Python does; > and even there, it's line breaks, not indentation - so we're > talking more like REXX than Python. In fact, it's not uncommon > for poetry to be laid out on a single line with slashes to > divide lines: There's lots of poetry with significant indentation, though. Imbuing the shape of the text on the page with significance is a thing. -- Neil Cerutti