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Free-form Language




Most free-form languages descend from languages such as Fortran 77 used particular columns for line numbers, which structured languages don't use or need. Lisp languages are also free-form, although they do not descend from Algol.
REXX is mostly free-form, though in some cases Whitespace is a Concatenation operator.

One recent language which has abandoned parts of the free-form idiom is Python , which uses indentation with whitespace to delimit program blocks. Some critics regard this as a throwback, and find Python text harder to read and edit as it lacks the obvious punctuation of C or Pascal. Python aficionados, however, contend that it improves readability: since indentation is commonly used in structured languages to make block structure visible, Python's use of whitespace ensures that the two are consistent.


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