Syntactically Significant Whitespace

In Python, leading spaces are significant: they denote nesting.

In C, one writes nested code within curly braces:

 for (int i=0; i < 10; i++) {
foo(i);
bar(i);
 }
 notNestedAnymore();

In Python, one writes:
 for i in range(0, 10):
foo(i)
bar(i)
 notNestedAnymore()

Spaces before foo(i) and bar(i) are significant. Absence of space (dedent) before notNestedAnymore() is also significant. (Technically it's SyntacticallySignificantIndentaton?; Python doesn't care about non-leading whitespace)

This enforces good indentation and therefore readability, and saves significant amount of typing (3 keystrokes per block) and vertical space.


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