On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Octavian Rasnita <orasn...@gmail.com> wrote: > From: "Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> >> >> Since indentation seems so crucial to easy comprehension of the logical >> structure of a program, >> making it a mandatory syntactical structure becomes a desirable feature >> for code that must be maintained (by others, in many cases). > > Why "in many cases"? I wrote hundreads of programs which are working fine > and which are maintained only by me. (But they would be very easy to > maintain by other people if it would be necessary). > So in that case, why to be forced to use a strict indentation?
The reason for clear code is maintenance, not maintenance-by-others. If you come back to something in a year, you'll appreciate proper variable names, indentation, etc. That said, though, I still do not believe in Python's philosophy of significant whitespace. I like to be able, if I choose, to put one entire "logical unit" on one line, such that it can be commented out with a single comment marker, or duplicated to another line and one copy commented out, or whatever. To that end, I sometimes want to put an if, its associated else, and sometimes a statement for both branches, all in the one line. And that's not possible when whitespace alone defines the end of an if/else block (the one-line form of a Python 'if' can't have a non-conditional statement after it at all), but is quite easy when things are delimited with braces. Bug report: The "from __future__ import braces" statement isn't working properly. Pls fix, kthxbye. :) But I still like Python overall. There's no such thing as a perfect language, and when it comes to syntax disagreements, I dislike Python's significant whitespace far less than I dislike PHP's adorned variable names. And Python, under the hood, is a very good engine for doing what I need to do. Chris Angelico -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
