So I was just wondering if Erlang could be made indentation sensitive. I’m happy to know that someone’s working on it!

The way this hack works, you have to explicitly tell the compiler that the code is indentation-sensitive, at which point it switches to another token scanner.

The only indentation-sensitive language I’ve done any half-serious work in was FORTRAN, so I’m not crusading to get this introduced into Erlang – I’m mainly playing around because I was curious to see how it would work out.

Having paid my dues with columns in FORTRAN and my hatred for indentation in Python, an otherwise superb language, please resist the temptation to make Erlang column sensitive.

With so many editors and IDEs disagreeing over tab settings, it’s only a matter of time before my code gets mixed up.

The purpose of the test module is of course not to illustrate how beautiful it can be, but rather to verify that the parser does its job correctly, including parsing “old-style” functions, like test(). But I agree: I think that there is no loss of understanding – only less noise.