The only time I miss block delimiters in Python is when I want to
temporarily change the scope of a block. Suppose I have this code:
for x in list1:
i += 1
for y in list2:
print x * i
Ignore the semantics for the moment (yes the code is suboptimal). Say I
need to disable the for y loop for a moment, but I want to keep the print
statement. I'd like to just do this
for x in list1:
i += 1
# for y in list2:
print x * i
and have the print line execute as part of the for x block. In other
words, I want the block with print to be in the scope of the for x loop.
But instead it raises a SyntaxError because the indentation is different.
Changing the indentation here isn't a big deal, but imagine the block
inside y is very long. Imagine you're disabling several blocks or multiple
levels of nested blocks at one time. It quickly becomes a thorny issue.
Using a debugger to disable it at run-time doesn't always help either.
This seems a common enough problem that I suspect there's a python way to
handle it. I don't see a good way without resorting to block delimiters
though, so I'm asking here for ideas.
Apologies if this has been covered before. I did some searches of the
python docs and newsgroup archives but couldn't find anything relevant
(which may say more about my searching abilities than anything else).
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