A modest indentation proposal

[Andreas Kostyrka]

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Am Samstag, 1. Dezember 2001 08:25 schrieb Erann Gat:
> No, I'm not asking for a fundamental change to the language syntax.  I'm
> asking for the functionality of pindent.py to be packaged up as an emacs
> mode, and for the parser to warn me when there's a discrepancy between the
> indentation that pindent.py would produce and what's actually in the
> file.  I'm also asking that "# end for" be spelled ";".  That's all.
This a FUNDAMENTAL change how it would work. It would generate Warnings for 
existing source code (find/grep are your friends here).
Basically it would change how the Interpreter behaves: It would emit extra 
data on some file descriptor. Probably stderr, which might make some 
environment consider a script broken. ;)
If there would be a real problem, this might be acceptable. To solve a 
non-problem (believe me, I've been hacking Python since 1.3), this is not 
acceptable.

Alternativly, one could add an switch to the python interpreter to have "; 
indent" mode. But because of the legacy problem (see below) one would have to 
maintain 2 languages indefinitly.

You are basically saying (because you try to manipulate it this way), that 
your incompetent bosses are thinking is more important than millions other 
users?

Actually, going thru our old Python cvs archives, I've noticed that I 
personally produced ";" at the line end code mostly in 1996/1997.
Do you propose that I should change my quite legal code for your fancy?
(Well, it would be just 1-2kLOCs that I'd have to correct and recheck 
manually.) 
> > Did you manage to convince the lispers that the compilers should support
> > an optional ()-less infix syntax to make your boss happy?  They'd
> > probably say "so write a read macro" :)
>
> It turns out that what made the bosses unhappy about Lisp was not the
Well, actually, open source is here where it is, because it mostly doesn't 
give a damn what PHB (see www.dilbert.com) think about it's merits.

Your proposal doesn't have technical merit. Don't except that it will be done.
Additionally, YOU could implement YOUR changes, make a nice patch, and then 
it might be considered to be included with the mainstream python. Even then I 
wouldn't count on it, because it would require all Python programmers to 
learn a new Syntactic WART (because your proposal is a WART) to understand 
others source code.

> syntax but the fact that no one uses it.  And before you protest and tell
> me that it's not true that no one uses Lisp, yes, I *know* it's not true.
> I also know that indentation is not much of a problem in practice.
You basically know that your proposal doesn't have merit. So why are you 
still trying to argue it?

Andreas
- -- 
Andreas Kostyrka; Raiffeisenstr. 16/9; 2320 Zwölfaxing
Tel: +43/676/4091256; Fax: +43/1/7065299

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