Python indentation deters newbies?  beliavsky at beliavsky at
Mon Aug 16 15:12:07 CEST 2004  Peter Hansen <peter at> wrote in
message news:<AuWdnUL93se81L3cRVn-hQ at>...  > For example, if
90% of people who have the "indentation rash" > had previous
encounters with FORTRAN IV, then it ought to > be possible to
make it obvious in the early documentation > (tutorial, intro
page, etc) that Python is not FORTRAN and > doesn't suffer from
the same limitations with respect to > indentation/whitespace
significance as FORTRAN does.  Uh oh, people are picking on my
beloved Fortran :).  Fortran IV was standardized as Fortran 66.
Even the following Fortran standard, Fortran 77, had only "fixed
format" with the rigid column restrictions. The Fortran 90
standard introduced free format, and I think such code resembles
Python more closely than other compiled languages, because there
are no semicolons needed to terminate lines, and curly braces
are not used to delimit blocks.  It would be misleading to
discuss certain flaws