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Sort of: it was intended for punch cards, so in the early days specific columns had specific meanings. This explains it well: fortran - Why does COBOL have to be indented? - Stack Overflow[^]
FORTRAN had similar: Column 1 indicated a comment if it held a C or a *, columns 1-5 were labels, 6 allowed a line to continue from the previous one. But ... it removed all whitespace outside strings before compilation. And since it didn't require variable declaration (the type of a variable depended on the first letter in its name):
DO 100 i = 1, 10 Was VERY different from
DO 100 X = 1. 10
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I have a lot of horrible memories of large FORTRAN projects. Thankfully, none were in this century so the memories are a bit faded now but not gone entirely.
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FORTRAN only had one real rule: statements start in column seven
The early stuff, and a couple on the end, were for statement numbers and comment marks and things like that. But really, only one column location - so just line-em-up.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Except for labels - and you needed them for every flow-of-control statement: DO, GOTO, IF, ...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: Except for labels
Yeah - that's what I meant by statement numbers, but that's quite the wrong term.
Brings back memories - I could code FORTRAN faster than I could do Lotus 1-2-3 .
So long ago. Dark Hair. 11/2" taller. Mrs. Wife looking hot enough to stop traffic . . . sigh.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Likewise: but mine was even worse, because it used a preprocessor (it was the source for the preprocessor) to provide a "structured programming" approach to FORTRAN called ROOTS[^] - I worked for Rob for six months back in the day as part of my university industrial training.
And I still use the flowcharting methods for software design ... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: And I still use the flowcharting methods for software design ...
I remember always seeing that stuff. Somehow, it never seemed to catch on with me - just make it up as I go along*.
*An invisible map in my head, I suppose.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Darn - just when those memories had nearly vanished, I saw that stuff and it brought back a flood of nastiness. 
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FORTRAN and COBOL, I can forgive. They were beginning to shape the programming world. Python on the other hand I can not forgive. This is the information age, it supposes to shake off those silliness.
Admittedly no language is perfect. But when I look at some languages I had to scratch me head in disbelieve "What the heck?" Those times it always bring back memory of past Minnesota Governor Jesse Vantura's comments about St. Paul road system "They must've been designed by drunken Irish."
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OriginalGriff wrote: Sort of: it was intended for punch cards, so in the early days specific columns had specific meanings.
I can't believe you mentioned this! You set my therapy back decades! 
Funny story: my freshman year of college we submitted programs on punchcards. During the first class of the first course, we were warned to buy a wide marker. Type your deck, line the cards up neatly, then draw a diagonal stripe across the top of the deck. If the deck got out of order the stripe could be used to visually fix the order of the deck. Also use at least 2 rubber bands to hold the deck together, in case one broke.
If we had to make significant revisions to the program, the top could get messy with multiple stripes, but the manual labor of producing a deck made us better, more careful programmers. That and having 12 hour turnaround times on program runs near the end of the semester -- we could not afford to be sloppy at all. [It also made us accurate typists -- miss a stroke, throw out that card]
It's end of the semester and nearing midnight. I had dropped off my deck at noon and had walked across campus to pick up the deck + printout. My run had been successful so I got to sleep! 
Guy is walking towards me, carrying a deck of at least 300 cards. He drops the deck, the single rubber band breaks, and cards spray every where. No sign of a stripe on the top of the deck.
Poor guy looks like he's going to cry. He starts to get down on his knees to pick up the deck, straightens up, shakes his head, and walks away ...
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You have a twisted sense of humor.
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Greg Topham wrote: You have a twisted sense of humor.
At the time I was totally surprised. Maybe shocked.
In later thinking about it -- the guy was an upper classman, based upon personal appearance and the size of the deck (higher level class, longer programs). Everyone was warned to take the aforementioned care of the decks, and the displays for rubber bands and felt-tipped wide markers were right next to the punch cards in the campus store. Freshman knew enough to take care ... upper classmen should know even better.
It was a good warning for others.[^]
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"Modern" Fortran is a bit better with so-called free-format coding. Intel Fortran even offers Visual Fortran that integrates into Visual Studio. Maybe other compiler makers do something similar. It's not as painful as it once was. Thankfully.
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Yeah but a programming language that makes you say 'Neeh' ? 
modified 9-May-18 11:29am.
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glennPattonWork wrote: I am going to start using Notepad++
Use IDLE (the Python IDE) and its associated editor, it does all the spacing for you.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: Use IDLE (the Python IDE) and its associated editor, it does all the spacing for you.
Will it space a Tesla Roadster?
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
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maybe readonly
In Word you can only store 2 bytes. That is why I use Writer.
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Tried that, is there a switch I missed I couldn't get it to indent properly...
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Worked right out of the box for me ... I trust you remembered to add the colon at the end of your if, else, elif, while, etc. statements.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: it does all the spacing for you
And reveal all the passwords you're trying to enter
And fight with matplotlib over cpu time
I can't count the number of ppl not believing me when I told them that IDLE was causing their problems.
I even made some relaunch code, just to make my Python scripts escape from IDLE's claws  
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No, never seen any of those, not had any problem with IDLE. And I don't quite see how it can reveal your passwords. Maybe you are doing something wrong.
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I am not going to discuss the details because this is the Lounge. I don't like IDLE because it changes the behavior of the language; and with a few tweaks, Notepad++ does everything I want.
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Martijn Smitshoek wrote: I don't like IDLE because it changes the behavior of the language
How exactly does it do that?
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try in IDLE:
import getpass
getpass.getpass() then type something.
Not very useful.
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