On Tuesday, 3 May 2016 at 22:17:18 UTC, cym13 wrote:
That has direct consequences on our problem. The fact that
Python's function become harder to work with when they become
bigger is a tool, and a useful one. When your Python code
becomes hard to work with it raises a flag : “Stop where you
are there should be a better, simpler way to do it.” Python's
only goal is to produce readable code so it has a lot of tools
to help you reduce its size. Keyword arguments are a good
example. There are a lot of functions in phobos that share a
common prefix just because it was too hard to make them share
the same name in a generic way where they would just be
separated by a keyword argument in Python.
But Python sacrifices a *lot* of performances to do that. D has
its own way and different goals. Being performance-friendly is
one of them and that sometimes gets you with long functions and
ugly hacks. When it comes to that having curly braces (well any
kind of delitmiter really) is a great thing.
tl;dr: syntactic oddities are tools and you can't judge
different tools without understanding the context in which they
are used and what problem they are meant to solve. D isn't
really meant for the kind of code that benefits most of having
no curly braces.
I don't understand your reasoning how curly braces makes D faster
than Python.
There is no causation between syntax and performance.
Design two programming languages which only differ about curly
braces and semi colons. Once they are parsed into an AST all
differences are gone. The compiler will output the same code, so
performance must be the same.
Is Python more readable than D? I believe this is subjective.
Overall, I believe there is no significant objective difference
between different syntax. It makes a difference once you are used
to some style and many people these days are used to curly braces
and semicolons.
