Making spaces significant in that fashion is mind-bogglingly awful.
Let's look at a language that does this:
[steve@sylar ~]$ cat ws-example.rb
def a(x=4)
  x+2
end
b = 1
print (a + b), (a+b), (a+ b), (a +b), "\n"
[steve@sylar ~]$ ruby ws-example.rb
7773
Hmm. That's pretty nasty, all right. Not that Python can claim to be
immune to such behaviour:
File "<stdin>", line 1
3. real
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Though the fact that one of the cases raises an exception (rather than
silently giving some different behaviour) ameliorates things a bit.
It ameliorates it *completely* -- you won't get silent errors in Python
because you add or delete whitespace around a dot.
"I find it amusing when novice programmers believe their main job is
preventing programs from crashing. ... More experienced programmers
realize that correct code is great, code that crashes could use
improvement, but incorrect code that doesn't crash is a horrible
nightmare."
http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html
The edge case occurs because dot does double-duty as an operator and as
part of float literals. However, float literals never include whitespace:
File "<stdin>", line 1
1 . 5
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
and likewise for 1. 5 and 1 .5 -- the only way to get a float literal
with a decimal point is by not including whitespace in it. So there is
never any ambiguity about floats. You can even do this:
'1.5'
And since . is an operator outside of float literals, you can do this:
'linux2'
although why you'd want to escapes me
This actually is a feature, since it is useful when calling methods on
int literals. However this is a very rare thing to do.
