John David Stone scripsit:

> Icon does feature syntactically significant whitespace, in that
> newline can be used as alternative statement terminator, in place of a
> semicolon.

If newline as a statement terminator counts as syntactically significant
whitespace, then there are a lot bigger guns than Icon that have it,
starting with Fortran, Cobol, and Basic, and going on to every command
language ever created.  To bracket such languages with identation
sensitive ones is to trivialize the concept.

> This was a serious design blunder in Icon, since it requires
> the programmer to think very carefully about the low-level syntactic
> structure of any statement that extends over more than one line, to avoid
> breaking lines in places where a statement could terminate.

If you're worried about it, make sure all continued lines end in _,
that's all.

--
Here lies the Christian,                        John Cowan
        judge, and poet Peter,                  http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Who broke the laws of God                       xxxxxx@ccil.org
        and man and metre.