On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 04:57:05PM -0600, Gabriel Sechan wrote:
The problem is that its much easier to get whitespace wrong than it is to get braces wrong. For example- one of my most frequent refactors is changing the nesting of a chunk of code- either moving it into a loop, out of a loop, or into a new function. If you use braces, the code will work, but may be indented in an ugly matter. If you do it with whitespace, it will be broken.
I would instead argue that this particular example is evidence of why indent-based blocking is a good thing, rather than bad. When I move a block of code in python, it is immediately obvious to me what kind of nesting change is needed. It is just a few keystrokes to shift the block to the right place. With braces, it is very easy to have them wrong, but get the indentation right.
And if you mention auto-indent tools in editors- if you need an editor to have a certain feature to avoid a common bug, you have a language flaw.
This isn't an auto-indent thing, just shifting a block of code to the left or right. Auto-indent isn't really very useful in something like Python, since the auto-indenter will be based off of the syntax. Since the indentation is the syntax, you just have to tell the editor what to do. Dave -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
