Comment by pjc50
6 years ago
Bit strange thinking of Python as "old" .. anyway, what I suspect happened was that tabs were the "new" innovation - in the post-punchcard era. Punchcards couldn't meaningfully have a tab character, but they could have fixed character positions, and this feature was required by COBOL and FORTRAN in their day. It was still present in the F77 standard.
I think the other thing that got in the way of standardising on TAB was that 8 character indent is too much, but once you let people configure it it's no longer consistent between systems.
> that's some impressively old code to find on GitHub
You may like https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
> Bit strange thinking of Python as "old"
Python is about 30 years old. Started by Guido van Rossum in December 1989.
Python is older than HTTP, older than the Web.
It's older than most programming languages still in common use today (TIOBE).
I think most people would think of Python as "old" if they thought about its history. Its current cool factor in AI and employment makes it seem newer than it is.