For those who actually need something like this in production, there is Snek: <https://sneklang.org/> “Snek is a tiny embeddable language targeting processors with only a few kB of flash and ram.”
Or you just forbid mixing spaces and tabs in the same indentation sequence, the way most whitespace-sensitive languages seem to end up doing. Or you make a slightly more reasonable rule: spaces may follow tabs, but no tabs may follow a space. That's at least unambiguous.
But it also feels arbitrary and annoyingly restrictive. On top of that there are at least 25 whitespace codepoints in UTF. Should your language really be opinionated about when, where, and in what order (for example) the "mongolian vowel separator" appears?
For those who actually need something like this in production, there is Snek: <https://sneklang.org/> “Snek is a tiny embeddable language targeting processors with only a few kB of flash and ram.”
This seems to be in the same spirit as Justine Tunney's SectorLISP. Very cool.
https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/
Good use of free will and well-written. Very nice walkthrough austin!
A lot of criticism of python often mentions the whitespace as lexical scope tokens, and that criticism is usually posited by users of the language.
As implementer of an interpreter, did you feel that whitespace for lexical scoping made the job of writing the lexer significantly more complex?
And, there are multiple white space symbols!
<space><space><tab><space>
is different than
<space><tab><space><space>
So you also have to track the actual sequence of counts of white space used for each level, rather than just a simple count.
Or you just forbid mixing spaces and tabs in the same indentation sequence, the way most whitespace-sensitive languages seem to end up doing. Or you make a slightly more reasonable rule: spaces may follow tabs, but no tabs may follow a space. That's at least unambiguous.
But it also feels arbitrary and annoyingly restrictive. On top of that there are at least 25 whitespace codepoints in UTF. Should your language really be opinionated about when, where, and in what order (for example) the "mongolian vowel separator" appears?
> <space><space><tab><space> is different than <space><tab><space><space>
in my view, both are the same, both `is` (or ===) an IndentationError raise
It's just a stack containing strings at the end of the day. Really not a big deal.
the blog post is pretty well-written! loved how he wrote about the the code-golfing part.
I was very disappointed that this is “interpreting” some tiny made up language.
This is not Python, or even within three orders of magnitude of Python.
It’s true, the title should have said “Python-like”