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  All you have give up for this is tightly-packed arithmetic statements, like this:

    5*5-3

  Instead, you have to give your tokens some breathing room:

    5 * 5 - 3
I don't know, that seems pretty stupid too.


and gets even worse if you bring variables into the game.

a = 5

b = 3

everybody from nearly every programming language would expect that after

c = a-b

you will find c to be 2 not nil (or throwing an exception or whatever)


I never pack my code like that without whitespace, as doing so is only readable when you have single-letter variables, which is not very common.

I agree with the OP. CamelCase and underscores are both scourges.


I've always found code without spaces around these symbols to be very undreadable.


Yes, but in this case it's not about readability, but about extremely significant whitespace. Forgetting a space and your code has a totally different meaning.


Whitespace is already extremely significant in programming. "foo[1]" vs "foo [1]" for example.


Depends on language, in Ruby those statements would be identical. But anyway, that's no reason to make things even worse.


In Ruby those statements are the same when foo is bound to an array, but they are different when foo is bound to a function...


And I have found the opposite. Horses for courses.




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