From: "Chris Angelico" <ros...@gmail.com>
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Octavian Rasnita <orasn...@gmail.com>
wrote:
From: "Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com>
Since indentation seems so crucial to easy comprehension of the logical
structure of a program,
making it a mandatory syntactical structure becomes a desirable feature
for code that must be maintained (by others, in many cases).
Why "in many cases"? I wrote hundreads of programs which are working fine
and which are maintained only by me. (But they would be very easy to
maintain by other people if it would be necessary).
So in that case, why to be forced to use a strict indentation?
The reason for clear code is maintenance, not maintenance-by-others.
If you come back to something in a year, you'll appreciate proper
variable names, indentation, etc.
That said, though, I still do not believe in Python's philosophy of
significant whitespace. I like to be able, if I choose, to put one
entire "logical unit" on one line, such that it can be commented out
with a single comment marker, or duplicated to another line and one
copy commented out, or whatever. To that end, I sometimes want to put
an if, its associated else, and sometimes a statement for both
branches, all in the one line. And that's not possible when whitespace
alone defines the end of an if/else block (the one-line form of a
Python 'if' can't have a non-conditional statement after it at all),
but is quite easy when things are delimited with braces.
Yes I also agree with that, and I also prefer *in some cases* to write short
code in a single line like:
print "..." if $var;
print $var == 123 ? "abcd" : "cedf";
print $var =~ /foo/ ? "abc" : "cdef";
...instead of writing a few lines of code. These constructs are not
recommended for Perl either, and Perl::Critic would give a warning when it
will be used with a certain level of errors checking, but it is preferable
to be able to do what you want how you or your team want, not as the creator
of the programming language wants.
And I don't think that there are programmers that find the lines above hard
to understand or maintain.
Octavian
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