[K12OSN] ISO: Good programming language to teach an 8yr old

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2004-03-19 at 14:15, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> > But if you want them to ever be able to deal with other languages
> > you should warn them that it is unusual (no, bizarre...) for whitespace
> > to be significant.
> 
> I don't see how that would be a problem. And existance of things like 
> auto-indentation tools tells me that whitespace *is* significant in 
> other languages as well, people are just too reluctant to admit it. :)

I think if this were your first language you might expect a loop
to work because it looks like it should work instead of following
the block delimiters to see what it really does. Also, I usually
write the inside parts of loops first without knowing how deeply
they will be nested - kind of like building a brick without knowing
how tall the building will be.  With explicit delimiters I can
wait until everything is in place before letting an auto-indent
tool make it pretty.  If the indentation mattered, I'd waste a
lot of time adjusting every time an enclosing level is added.  Is
there an editor function to do that for you in python without
figuring out how many lines you need to shift?

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com