tabs do WHAT?

[Glen Starchman]

The forced indentation in python does something that no amount of cajoling,
lambasting, etc... can do for a development staff: it forces them to group their
code in logical structures, making it MUCH easier to debug, etc...

what would you rather debug:

for (i=1; i < 100; i++){
do something hideous here;
and then something else here;}

or

for i in range(100):
    do something pleasant here
    and then something else

Personally, there is nothing I hate more in the curly-brace languages than the fact
that developers don't have to line up their braces to show groupings of code. I
guess if every C/C++/Java, etc... developer wrote code like:

for (i=0; i < 100; i++)
{
    do something;
} /* notice how the braces line up and the body is indented!*/

I would be happy with that approach. However, there is nothing better than forcing
clean code... in my very humble opinion.



Thomas Hamelryck wrote:

> [Thomas Hamelryck  <thamelry at vub.ac.be>]
> : But many languages have evolved exactly this way: users criticize,
> : complain, praize and whine, thereby influencing the shape of the
> : languge in question.
>
> [Doug Landauer <landauer at apple.com>]
> : Yes, this works well in many cases, including Python.  Notice that
> : it is, for the most part, *non*-users of python who complain about
> : the indentation.  _Users_, for the most part, like it.  Languages
> : that change by catering to the tastes of non-users tend not to do
> : so well.
>
> I agree that most users of python seem to like the strict indentation rule.
> I seem to be one of the few actual python users who do not like it. The
> complaints about the indentation do not really come from *non*-users of python.
> Rather, they come from people who have gotten interested in python for some
> reason or another and are completely turned down by the idiosyncratic use of
> syntactically significant whitespace and/or tabs. So python is missing a lot
> of potential momentum beacuse of the indentation stuff. I find this a pity.
>
> Still a great language though.
>
> Cheers,
>
> ---
> Thomas Hamelryck    Institute of Molecular and Structural Biology
> Aarhus University   Gustav Wieds Vej 10C
> DK-8000 Aarhus C    Denmark