On 2009-09-13, Peng Yu <pengyu...@gmail.com> wrote: > One disadvantage of using indentation to denote a block of code is > that the runtime to automatically indent a python code would be about > a few times more than the runtime to automatically indent a C++ code > of the same length (both are in vim).
Talking about "automatically indenting Python" makes no sense. It would be the equivalent of removing all the braces "{}" from C code and then talking about automatically inserting them in the proper places. If you had a program that could do that, you might as sell just have it generate all of the source code for you from scratch. In C, indentation is just a redundant visual clue for the reader. It is needed because people are really awful at parsing block delimiters and if/then/else/while sematics visually. In python the indentation _is_ the block delimiters, which means that the block structures perceived by the reader via indentation _always_ matches the block structure seen by the compiler. That's not true in C, and it causes all sorts of bugs when the structure perceived by the reader (via indenation) doesn't match that perceived by the compiler (via braces). -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! If I had a Q-TIP, I at could prevent th' collapse visi.com of NEGOTIATIONS!! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list