Whitespace delimiters suck
Gordon McMillan
gmcm at hypernet.com
Fri Jan 21 08:49:06 EST 2000
Roy Smith wrote:
> When I was first learning programming (a quarter of a century ago!),
> there was the idea of the "telephone test", i.e. your code should be
> simple enough that if you read it to somebody on the phone they would
> understand it. Python not only fails the phone test,
Do the same thing that the parser (or tokenizer) does: say
"INDENT" and "DEDENT". Or run it through pyindent and read
that over the phone.
> it fails the
> printed page test; I can print two programs on a piece of paper, which
> differ only in tabs and spaces, and they will appear identical yet which
> do different things. Barf.
While theoretically possible, I have never seen whitespace
confusion induced by different editor settings create a
syntactically valid program.
And there's tabnanny and tabcleaner if this is a common
problem for you.
- Gordon
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