Thoughts from a newbie

[Ben Leslie]

On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Terry Reedy wrote:

> 
> "Steve" <stevesusenet at yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:6f8cb8c9.0212131330.594d9a08 at posting.google.com...
> > I decided to learn Python after comments from people I respect
> highly
> > recommended it.
> ...
> > Since indentation is used by most conscientous coders anyway, some
> use
> > of punctuation markings becomes superfluous and even a kind of
> visual
> > interferance/flak.
> 
> This was exactly my reaction -- 6 or 7 years ago.  Welcome
> 
> > In fact, I don't think python takes the idea of enforced
> > neatness/readability far enough :).
> 
> Perhaps a bit of newbie overenthusiasm?
> 
> > There are two coding habits that I see often that makes code harder
> to
> > understand:
> >
> > 1. excessive nesting
> 
> What arbitrary cutoff would you enforce? ;<)

I don't think you need to explicitly enforce this, by enforcing
80 character length you pretty much get rid of excessive nesting 
anyway.
 
> > 2. lines longer then 80 chars
> 
> With proportional fonts, 80 chars is pretty arbitrary.

But who uses proportional fonts for reading or writing code?
PEP 8 (http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0008.html), which recommends
limitting length goes into detail about why such a thing is a
good thing[tm].

To the first poster, I really doubt there is any practical way
to do what you want on a community wide scale, but, if you wanted
to try, I'd reccomend writing some code which checked the style of
code. If you distribute that and people start using it then your
wish might come true :)

Cheers,
Benno