On 24/01/2017 04:41, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 3:22 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
But more seriously, it's easy to typo an extra indent. It's harder to typo
"endif" when you actually meant to type, oh, "ending = 1 if condition else 3",
say. So faced with ambiguity, and the insistence that the right way to break
ambiguity is to guess ("Do What I Mean, dammit!!!") the most likely guess is
that the indentation is wrong.
But not guaranteed. That's the thing about being ambiguous -- there is a chance
that the indentation is correct.
Indeed. I teach JavaScript as well as Python, and I've seen some
pretty horrendous indentation flaws (examples available if people ask
privately, but I will anonymize them because I'm not here to shame
students) - but there have been nearly as many cases where the
indentation's fine and the bracket nesting isn't. I probably sound
like a broken record [1] with the number of times I've said "check
your indentation", as a hint to where the missed-out close brace or
parenthesis is. True, with "endif" it's a bit harder to typo, but it's
still just as easy to make a copy-and-paste error and end up with code
like this:
if condition:
statement
endif
statement
endif
What's this code meant to do? Can't know.
But whatever it does, a language that enforces 'endif' would report an
error, so requiring further investigation. Without the 'endifs', it
would look like this:
if condition:
statement
statement
Legal python.
Presumably you don't like parentheses in function calls for the same
reasons; you'd prefer 'f a,b,c' rather than 'f(a,b,c)' in case, with
copy&paste, someone might end up with: 'f(a,b,c),d)'.
Having 'f a,b,c,d' is better; much less chance of those pesky syntax errors!
Remember: If you have only one clock, it might be right and it might
be wrong, but it's consistent. If you have two clocks and they
disagree, you have no clue what the time is.
I've actually got three wall clocks. Usually only one will disagree with
the other two, meaning it needs a new battery. But don't they use such
systems in avionics?
--
Bartc
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