this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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Because I am not counting white space when I read. Or should we just write machine code/assembler/pick something straight away?
Not sure I'm following the jump from significant whitespace to machine code. How are those related?
Human and machine read differently. If you ignore that (in case with indentation), then why bother with writing human-friendly form of code, when what is going to be really executed is something else?
If anything, that sounds like an argument in favor of significant indentation, not against it. Humans and machines read differently, yes, which is why we tend to add whitespace and indentation to code even for programming languages where it's not significant. We do that expressly because it makes the code more human-friendly, so it's quite the opposite of ignoring their differences.