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Python is the only langauage where this matters. You can write pretty much every other langauage in one long string if you want (fhats what the compiler does to it). But that makes it really hard to read
Thats not what I'm talking about.
python is one of the few popular languages where presentation is semantic but I'm talking about separating semantics from presentation. you should be able to radically change how you see the code without actually changing the file.
I should be able to apply a personal style to the code and view it with small indentations, or large indentations, with line widths of 80char or 120char, function args within parentheses or not. I should even be able to localize it into another natural language, or even view and edit it as a flow chart instead of text, all without actually changing the underlying file that contains the semantics.
Youve never written a compiler have you
Have you?
Is your argument that compilers need to change their output based on the way that text gets displayed to users? That's a pretty wild claim to make.
Yes i have. Several. Its kind of a right of passage after a certain point. They evaluate your desired commands by interpreting the symbols you use and the order you put them in. So yes if you put your symbols in different orders they will be interpreted differently. The way the text is displayed to users is a representation of how it is stored. If you want to have different viewing standards for the same code youre going to have to ALSO code for those different views. Or you force it and tell everyone that YOUR way is the ONLY way and you code your IDE as such.
For pretty much every language BUT python you can "view" it however you want. So long as youre willing to code your display to do as much.
Yes, of course I'm going to have to code for those different views. Where else would the views come from? Like if you want a webpage to look different, you need to make a new CSS, it doesn't just magically look different because you want it to.
If I want to view the code as a big graph, then I'm going to need to code a graph editor for it. If I want to view it with C style syntax, then I'd need to make a C style syntax editor for it. Etc.
We already get almost exactly this with JVM and .net language, because you have many languages that compile to their intermediary language, and then can be decompiled back into another language that uses that intermediary language (sorta). But it wasn't designed to do that, so when you try it's not great.
Wouldn't it be nice if the actual source of truth was the intermediary language, and I could view it as a graph, and you could view it as a c-style language, and someone else could view it as a c-style language but with tab indents and all the keywords were Spanish, and we could all edit it and see eachothers edits in our preferred format?