I won't speak for Abigail-II, but I object strongly to the whitespace rules that were shown in A12. I know Abigail-II has objected to the hash index whitespace restrictions in earlier Apocs, but they didn't bug me so much. The method lookups are a different story.

I also think the A12 whitespace restrictions highlight a problem that has always been there but few, if anyone, have ever noticed. In an awful lot of programming languages, parans are used both for grouping and for function calling, this being a relic of mathmatical notation. VB makes it even worse by using parens for array indexing.

I think we should come up with a completely different notation for these concepts, though I'm baffled as to what that notation should be. Perl6 is already crawling into Unicode to fill in the need for an increasing number of operators, and I'm not too fond of that, either.