On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Sun, 30 Dec 2012 09:30:10 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> Absolutely! Though it's roughly as good to have the current cursor >> position shown in a status line somewhere, and takes up less real >> estate. But yes, vital to be able to see that. Even when I'm sitting >> *right next to* my boss and communicating verbally, I'll talk about the >> code by quoting line numbers. "Let me explain. (No, there is too much. >> Let me sum up.) Pull up foobar dot jay ess and go to line 254-ish - see >> how the frobnosticator always gets called with a quuxed argument?" > > I call shenanigans :-P > > I don't expect that you keep in your head the line numbers (even the line > numbers-ish) of interesting or pertinent features of your code, > *especially* while the code is in active development and the line numbers > are rapidly changing. I think it is far more likely that you keep > function, class or method names in your head (after all, you are > presumably reading and writing those names very often), and when you want > to demonstrate some feature, you *first* look it up by higher-level > object ("let's see the frob_quux function") to get the line number.
Neither. You're correct that I don't memorize line numbers; but the point of them was not to synchronize a screen with a brain, but to synchronize two screens. So you're also correct that I look it up to get the line number. But I'm not locating a function; if I wanted that, I'd use that. No, I'm pointing to a specific line of code. > Assuming that your functions and methods are not obnoxiously huge, I > think having a good class browser which lets you jump directly to > functions or methods is *far* more useful than line numbers, in this > context. They're not obnoxiously huge, but even twenty lines is too coarse when you're trying to explain one line of code. Way too coarse. I want to pinpoint what I'm talking about. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list