On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Jim Kinney <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jim.kinney@gmail.com" target="_blank">jim.kinney@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:atllinuxenthinfo@techstarship.com" target="_blank">atllinuxenthinfo@techstarship.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="im"><div><br>
</div></div>It's just that I'm philosophically opposed to having the way the program LOOKS to determine whether the program FUNCTIONS. And, it seems to me, that if the program doesn't function for that reason (whitespace), that it would be insanely hard to determine where the flaw is, since you're looking at the logic and you KNOW it works.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>tying visual structure to operant functionality is not a bad thing. It actually makes some portions of debugging very, very easy - look for the visual pattern of improperly nested indentations (secret - use a 2 or 3-space indent - makes it clear without eating too much horizontal space). Set up vim or emacs to use your preferred space count on <tab> press. <br>
<br>I find curly braces a visual distraction( and nearly impossible to write well by hand). Using pure whitespace as enclosures is subtle without being cryptic. As i learned more python, I found myself using very formal indentation is everything from bash to SQL.<br>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Indentation and curly braces are not mutually exclusive. I set up vi to for my preferred tabspace (2) and to expandtabs by default. The large downside of defining blocks by space is there's no way to "Go to the end of the matching whitespace" in vi (or some similar editor) like I can with braces (or parens or brackets). As soon as someone can show me how to do that for python code, it'll be one huge hurdle for me. I find the 'do ... end' blocks in ruby annoying for precisely the same reason and end up using braces there instead.</div>
<div><br></div><div>And, while the whitespace thing annoys me, my beef with Python (having grown up a Perl hacker) is a) the idea that there's only ONE way to do it in Python and b) the endless subclassing making it difficult to find out what your code's doing without having a Python IDE.</div>
</div><div><br></div>-- <br>Dylan Northrup<br>"Adversity is just change we haven't adapted ourselves to yet."<br> - Aimee Mullins