On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 10:51 PM, Randolph Bentson
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 06:48:52PM -0600, Larry Bugbee wrote:
>> On the flip side, Python's indentation may seem strange and perhaps awkward
>> for the first week or two, but do stick with it. I'll bet that after two
>> weeks you will not want to go back. Just be sure to set your editor to use
>> 4 spaces in lieu of tabs and indention is [virtually] painless. ...my
>> opinion.
>
> I struggled convincing an acquaintance that his complaints about the
> indentation rules were
> effectively complains about good programming style. A yardstick for good
> style is that the
> general structure should be visible from three feet. :-) Alas, I never
> persuaded him, but
> once he used Python for a bit, it became one of his favorite languages.
The reason indentation is so popular, in my opinion, is not just the
indentation but the colon. It's natural to introduce a clause with a
colon:
This is a block quote that serves to illustrate the principle.
I have generally liked Pylons' indentation. Although recently I read
about a disadvantage: screen readers don't understand indentation very
well, which makes Python hard for blind programmers. And the Python
compiler and docstring-processing routines do have to go through some
extra work to generate "indent" and "dedent" tokens; as if inferring
where the { } would be and reinstating them internally.
--
Mike Orr <[email protected]>
