PEP scepticism

[Steve Horne]

On Sun, 01 Jul 2001 10:06:14 -0400, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:

>indentation-for-grouping was a dumb idea.  The problem is that it is just 
>too easy to add or delete whitespace by accident (and without noticing), 
>especially when cutting and pasting hunks of code from one place to 
>another.  When such whitespace munging makes the code look ugly, it's 
>simply a minor annoyance.  When it changes the meaning of the code, it's a 
>language design mistake.

I've never had this problem. I'd say careful cutting and pasting -
generally meaning that when I cut large blocks they are made of
complete lines - was force of habit long before I used Python, simply
because the odds are I'll have to read the code later - and bad
indenting wastes a lot more time than taking care before you cut.

But yes - it is a valid, considered opinion.

Perhaps there would be some justification to wanting block structures
to be marked, and bad indentation could then perhaps cause an error
message to force you to tidy it up. But I don't know. I like Pythons
lack of clutter.

And so we return to the same old personal preferences.

-- 
Steve Horne
Home : steve at lurking.demon.co.uk
Work : sh at ttsoftware.co.uk