I don't think being whitespace-significant is a "hard pass" dealbreaker, but as someone who's not a fan of it, I'd say this only goes a small way towards alleviating that - like most "choose your preferred syntax" designs. Even if you're a lone-wolf developer, you're gonna end up reading a lot of example code and other material that's in the ugly whitespace-sensitive style, given that:
> The verbose syntax is not as commonly used ... The default syntax is the lightweight syntax.
And most people in practice are not lone-wolf devs, and so the existence of this syntax helps them even less.
> Static typing removes the downside of whitespace.
How so?
> Oh, and every language with line comments (so most of them) has significant whitespace.
Technically true, but that's not what people mean by "significant whitespace" in this context. So you're being pedantic rather than saying anything meaningful.
But you made me think. The ultimate nightmare would be significant trailing whitespace - the spaces and/or tabs after all the visible characters change the meaning of the line.
In f#'s case, there is the trifecta of everything being an expression, static typing and default immutability. This means you often write code like this:
let foo =
if bar then
baz
else
someDefault
Due to it being an expression you assign what the if evaluates to to foo.
Due to static typing, the compiler checks that both branches return the same type.
Due to the default immutability you don't declare and assign in separate steps.
What this results in, is that accidentally using the wrong indentation for something usually results in an error at compile time, at the latest.
Compared to how python does significant whitespace is that it's dynamic typing + statement based, which means you can easily end up assigning different types to the same variable in different branches of an if, for example.
Well I don’t know what issue you have with whitespace, but the usual complaint is that programs with small typos are syntactically valid but logically incorrect. This is why CoffeeScript became so disliked. A static type checker makes this scenario much less likely since it won’t compile.
I would also add that F# has some indentation rules (“offside rules”) and tabs are disallowed, further shrinking the input space.
This isn't such a big issue in my experience. Auto-formatting helps a lot, the code needs to be just syntactically correct.
The default F# autoformatter is bundled/supported by VS Code, VS and Rider [0].
[0]: https://fsprojects.github.io/fantomas/docs/end-users/StyleGu...
F# has both "lightweight" (indentation-based) and "verbose" syntax. If you don't like significant whitespace, you can just use the latter.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...
That's an interesting idea and implementation.
I don't think being whitespace-significant is a "hard pass" dealbreaker, but as someone who's not a fan of it, I'd say this only goes a small way towards alleviating that - like most "choose your preferred syntax" designs. Even if you're a lone-wolf developer, you're gonna end up reading a lot of example code and other material that's in the ugly whitespace-sensitive style, given that:
> The verbose syntax is not as commonly used ... The default syntax is the lightweight syntax.
And most people in practice are not lone-wolf devs, and so the existence of this syntax helps them even less.
I was with it until I heard no braces :/
I have some good news for you about C#.
I love C#, its a great language
1 reply →
C# doesn't require braces...?
You never touch python code either?
not since they binned 2.7
Static typing removes the downside of whitespace.
Oh, and every language with line comments (so most of them) has significant whitespace.
> Static typing removes the downside of whitespace.
How so?
> Oh, and every language with line comments (so most of them) has significant whitespace.
Technically true, but that's not what people mean by "significant whitespace" in this context. So you're being pedantic rather than saying anything meaningful.
But you made me think. The ultimate nightmare would be significant trailing whitespace - the spaces and/or tabs after all the visible characters change the meaning of the line.
In f#'s case, there is the trifecta of everything being an expression, static typing and default immutability. This means you often write code like this:
let foo = if bar then baz else someDefault
Due to it being an expression you assign what the if evaluates to to foo. Due to static typing, the compiler checks that both branches return the same type. Due to the default immutability you don't declare and assign in separate steps. What this results in, is that accidentally using the wrong indentation for something usually results in an error at compile time, at the latest.
Compared to how python does significant whitespace is that it's dynamic typing + statement based, which means you can easily end up assigning different types to the same variable in different branches of an if, for example.
I hope I explained it in understandable terms
2 replies →
> How so?
Well I don’t know what issue you have with whitespace, but the usual complaint is that programs with small typos are syntactically valid but logically incorrect. This is why CoffeeScript became so disliked. A static type checker makes this scenario much less likely since it won’t compile.
I would also add that F# has some indentation rules (“offside rules”) and tabs are disallowed, further shrinking the input space.