On 04/30/2015 03:22 PM, Roel Schroeven wrote:
Alan Gauld schreef op 2015-04-30 00:51:
> ...
Trying to visually scan for _ or even __ is hard. Also different
fonts make _ and __ hard to distinguish.
> ...
But they will be. Almost for certain. It's human nature and the nature
of code maintenance. If it's there somebody will find a use for it.
The fact that 5 or 10 years earlier the author didn't intend for it to
be used is immaterial.
Summarizing a bit, I think you make two main points (please correct me
if I'm wrong):
[1] Visually scanning for _ or __ is hard, and _ are __ hard to
distinguish from each other.
Personally, I find it easy to scan for them, but I think I can see whee
you're coming from. Python tends to prefer words and tends to dislike
symbols compared to e.g. C, C++, and certainly Perl. One could argue
that using _ or __ goes against that, though to me it's not a problem.
We're still very far from Perl's line noise.
It's true that _ and __ can be difficult to be distinguished from each
other, but that's also not a problem to me, since I don't care about
their values.
[2] Inevitably, sooner or later someone somewhere will start using _ or
__ despite the fact that by convention they should not be used.
I have to admit that I have no experience programming in larger teams,
and was blissfully unaware of the problems you describe. I think I can
see how it might be better to avoid __ rather than try to enforce good
coding discipline.
I still feel __ to be valuable, but I can see now where your dislike for
it is coming from. Thank you for your insights!
Well, are you aware that _ has a meaning in the debugger? It holds the
last value of an expression that wasn't assigned to a variable. or
something like that.
So even if you don't have any coworkers, you might trip on someone
else's assumptions.
To see what I'm talking about:
>>> 3*4
12
>>> print(_)
12
Best regards,
Roel
--
DaveA
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