I am interested in finding out who introduced code indentation, as well as when and where it was introduced.
It seems so critical to code comprehension, but it was not universal. Most Fortran and Basic code was (is?) unindented, and the same goes for Cobol.
I am pretty sure I have even seen old Lisp code written as continuous, line-wrapped text. You had to count brackets in your head just to parse it, never mind understanding it.
So where did such a huge improvement come from? I have never seen any mention of its origin.
Apart from original examples of its use, I am also looking for original discussions of indentation.
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character if you were making a comment.if
, a la F#), indentation isn't really a language feature, it's an IDE feature (and a bit in the compiler, to ignore leading spaces). @Jack's right - originally programs were punched on cards, and indentation literally didn't exist in the storage (and perhaps shouldn't now, either). Columnar RPG doesn't use indentation (and you only have ~20 characters free per line anyways), but the IDE can "soft" indent the code for you.