Re: Python (was Re: I did not inhale)

Bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

On 27/08/2024 09:39, Richard Kettlewell wrote:

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> writes:

But even if that helps you organizationally, it doesn't resolve issues
of the interpreter potentially mis-parsing things due to mismatches in
tab/space factor between $EDITOR and the Python RTE, which is a truly
ridiculous thing to have to be concerned about.

In many years of using Python routinely and extensively I’ve simply
never found the whitespace issues that people are worrying about here to
be a problem in practice. Some of this may be a matter of experience but
if so, it’s a form of experience that must have built up very quickly.
As an aesthetic objection, of course, there’s no accounting for
taste. But it doesn’t seem to be a practical problem in reality.
(In contrast C’s rules have occasionally been a practical problem,
contributing to at least one high-profile software vulnerability and
attracting compiler warnings to mitigate the risks.)

>
These are the problems I've seen. I haven't used the language
extensively, but I've used it enough.

All I can say is that for the most part these issues just don’t arise
for me. Some are plainly aesthetic; I already addressed that. Others
sounds like issues with your tooling - changing the indentation of a
range of lines is easy in most editors, for example.

The cases that actually seem familiar:

(2) You want to temporarily comment out an 'if' line so that the
following block is unconditional. You can't do that with also
unindenting the block. And, also  the block then merges with the
following one as it's at the same level, so when you want to change it
back...

You can put ‘or True’ at the end of the condition.

(5) Sometimes you want to temporarily comment out the contents of a
block. But Python doesn't allow an empty block; now you have to use
'pass'. And then get rid of if later.

You can put an ‘if False’ at the top.

The fact that people have to resort to adding #end lines, which only
partly deals with one or two of those problems, suggest that something
is badly wrong.

I’ve never encountered anyone else doing that in Python. It suggests
more than the individual doing that just doesn’t like the language, in
which case I’d just suggest that person doesn’t use it.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/