I'm mostly surprised that they went into the actual parser/compiler and modified that. If I were crazy enough to do this, I'd probably just write a pythonb-to-python compiler.
Re:Python with Braces
by vezzy-fnord on Sunday February 09, 2014 @05:59PM
(#7207797)
Even then, this seems like a lot of work to overcome a non-problem, akin to developing a C++11 compiler which uses "begin" and "end" instead of braces because of some emotional attachment to Pascal.
The thing is, it's actually trivial to do that using the C++ preprocessor.
In fact, Steve Bourne wrote the Bourne shell exactly in this fashion, with the following C substitution macros (based on Algol-68):
#define STRING char *
#define IF if(
#define THEN ){
#define ELSE } else {
#define FI ;}
#define WHILE while (
#define DO ({
#define OD ;}
#define INT int
#define BEGIN {
#define END }
(this isn't to deny that Python with Braces is a rather frivolous idea)
Even then, this seems like a lot of work to overcome a non-problem, akin to developing a C++11 compiler which uses "begin" and "end" instead of braces because of some emotional attachment to Pascal. Really, if you are a programmer and the only thing stopping you from using Python to solve some problem is its indentation rules, you should stop and reevaluate your priorities.