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In computer programming, indentation style is a convention, a.k.a. style, governing the indentation of blocks of source code.An indentation style generally involves consistent width of whitespace (indentation size) before each line of a block, so that the lines of code appear to be related, and dictates whether to use space or tab characters for the indentation whitespace.
As a consequence of its syntax, Whitespace source code can be contained within the whitespace of code written in a language that ignores whitespace – making the text a polyglot. [2] Whitespace is an imperative, stack-based language. The programmer can push arbitrary-width integer values onto a stack and access a heap to store data.
Language conventions also affect individual source files. Each compiler (or interpreter) used to process source code is unique. The rules a compiler applies to the source creates implicit standards. For example, Python code is much more consistently indented than, say Perl, because whitespace (indentation) is actually significant to the ...
For example, indenting at the beginning of line means on the left for a left-to-right script and on the right for right-to-left script. Indent is both a noun and a verb. The verb is the act of formatting text to be indented whereas the noun refers to the resulting empty space.
A free-format language ignores whitespace characters: spaces, tabs and new lines so the programmer is free to style the code in different ways without affecting the meaning of the code. Generally, the programmer uses style that is considered to enhance readability. The two code snippets below are the same logically, but differ in whitespace.
Java compilers do not enforce these rules, but failing to follow them may result in confusion and erroneous code. For example, widget.expand() and Widget.expand() imply significantly different behaviours: widget.expand() implies an invocation to method expand() in an instance named widget , whereas Widget.expand() implies an invocation to ...
Off-side rule languages: Boo, Cobra, CoffeeScript, F#, Haskell (in do-notation when braces are omitted), LiveScript, occam, Python, Nemerle (Optional; the user may use white-space sensitive syntax instead of the curly-brace syntax if they so desire), Nim, Scala (Optional, as in Nemerle)
These unnecessary characters usually include whitespace characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute. Minification reduces the size of the source code, making its transmission over a network (e.g. the Internet) more efficient.