On Sat, 20 Jan 2007, Toon Pieton wrote:
> In a program I'm writing, I'm getting a Tab/space error, with the usual
> 1) identation is incorrect or 2) mixes tabs and spaces. I just can't
> seem to find. I tried selecting everything and untabbing it, no workie.
> I searched an searched and searched, but couldnt find anything that is
> really wrong.
Hi Toon,
If you think you're running into tab/space issues, you can try running
tabnanny on your program; it should help you detect the problem:
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-tabnanny.html
But actually, there is a definite syntactic problem on one of the lines
before the one you're looking at. Take a very close look at:
> z = [yx[0],xz[0],xz[1],xz[2],xz[3],xz[4],xz[5)],xz[6]]
There is an extra right parenthesis there that is almost certainly not
supposed to be here.
By the way, the code you've shown us so far looks very syntactically
fragile; I'd have to look at more of the code, but a "code smell" I'm
sniffing is a lot of hardcoded array indexing. Are you trying to treat an
list as if it were a data structure?
Concretely, code that looks like the snippet above, or this code:
> highcard = [z[8],z[7],z[6],z[5],z[4]]
is very susceptible to off-by-one errors (as well as syntactic typos).
But even if it is technically correct, there's a more important reason why
we should avoid code like this: there's no explicit, human reasoning in
the numbers 8, 7, 6, 5, or 4 that would make it easy to know why the
highcard depends on those values. At least, we'd have to look at the rest
of the program to figure this out. So that knowledge is not as localized
as it should be.
There are often different ways to write this that are less susceptible to
syntactic typos. If you could put up your code somewhere on the web, some
of us here would be happy to do a code review with you.
> I can't post the whole program, since it's ~1000 lines long.
This is also a possible code smell. Unless my code estimation is way off,
I don't believe that code shouldn't be so long. Get your code reviewed:
we might be able to help you hack down the size of that code to something
significantly tighter.
Good luck to you.
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