allowing braces around suites

[Sam Holden]

On 31 Aug 2004 10:33:07 GMT, Antoon Pardon <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> wrote:
> Op 2004-08-28, Isaac To schreef <iketo2 at netscape.net>:
>>>>>>> "Kjetil" == Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho at yksi.ifi.uio.no> writes:
>>
>>    Kjetil> after all, code in _any_ language written by a
>>    Kjetil> professional will have strict indentation.  so it's just
>>    Kjetil> syntax.
>>
>> No.  In all other languages, people deal with *two* ways to find which
>> statement is associated with an if/while/for/whatever statement and
>> which is not: by looking at the indentation, and by looking at the
>> braces.  They normally look at the indentation, since it is the
>> quicker way.  But when they find something wrong, they look at the
>> defining braces, sometimes deeply hidden in long expressions and
>> statements combined into one line.  In Python, we have *one and only
>> one* way to find which statement is associated with an
>> if/while/for/whatever statement, and this is the quicker way that
>> people are used to.
>
> I doubt that.
>
> I used to limit myself to indentation to see which code belonged
> to which control. But then I found myself witch controls that
> were so nested it was hard to see to which if a particular
> else suite belonged and I started to use end markers in comments
> to make the structure more visible.

Deep nesting is a bad sign in itself, regardless of how a language
specifies block structure. Making the code readable by removing
the unreadable nesting seems a far better solution than adding
end markers.

-- 
Sam Holden