Larry Wall's comment on python...

dsavitsk dsavitsk at e-coli.net
Fri Sep 6 19:34:32 EDT 2002


"Gillou" <nospam at bigfoot.com> wrote in message
news:albdk2$2iro$1 at norfair.nerim.net...
> "Rod Stephenson" <viking_kiwi at yahoo.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
> wkr8g7rn4c.fsf at yahoo.com...
> > Slashdot has a list of questions posed to Larry Wall (perl). When
> > asked his thoughts on other scripting languages, he makes the
> > following observation about python
> >
> > "Python is cool to look at small bits of, but I think the "outline"
> > syntax breaks down with larger chunks of code. I'm with Aristotle on
> > the structure of discourse--a story should have a beginning, and
> > middle, and an end. So should blocks"
> >
> > I'm not quite sure what he's trying to get at here - I guess that for
> > a long heavily indented chunk of code, you could lose track of the
> > overall structure, but I don't write code this way.
> >
> > Any comments?
>
> Long heavily indented chunks of code is a really bad programming style
> (whatever's the language).
> Modern python editors can find blocks, hide/show blocks, auto
indent/dedent
> blocks, and find start/end of blocks.

Further, those of us used to using, say, the treeview in Outlook [Express]
to read newsgroups, or other similarly structured interfaces, find the
hierarchy of Python indenting quite natural.

-d


> Tabnanny does a fine job on ugly indenting.
>
> def longfunction():
>     # 300 lines of code below
>     ...
>     return
> # end longFunction()
>
>





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