On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote: > On 2013-07-31, Skip Montanaro <s...@pobox.com> wrote: >>> I don't understand. That just moves them to a different file -- >>> doesn't it? You've still got to deal with editing a large table of >>> data (for example when I want to add instructions to your assembler). >> >> My guess is it would be more foolproof to edit that stuff with a >> spreadsheet. > > Many years ago, I worked with somebody who used a spreadsheet like > that. I tried it and found it to be way too cumbersome. The overhead > involved of putting tables in to slew of different files and starting > up LibreOffice to edit/view them is huge compared to just editing them > with emacs in a file along with the source code. Maybe my computer is > too old/slow. Maybe it's just due to how bad I am at Excel/LibreOffice...
I'm glad someone else feels that way! At work, we have a number of CSV files (at my boss's insistence; I would much rather they be either embedded in the source, or in some clearer and simpler format) which I like to manipulate in SciTE, rather than OO/LibreOffice. (I'll not distinguish those two. Far as I'm concerned, they're one product with two names.) My boss can't understand why I do this. I can't understand why he objects to having to edit code files to alter internal data. I have pointed him to [1] but to no avail. The one thing I would do, though, is align with tabs rather than spaces. That gives you an 8:1 (if you keep your tabs at eight, which I do) improvement in maintainability, because edits that don't cross a boundary don't require fiddling with the layout. [1] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Soft_Coding.aspx ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list