Completely INNOCENT Indentation question

[Caleb Hattingh]

Actually, it should be trivial.

1.  Set the preferance in your editor
2.  Write a preprocessor (in python) that you supply with your program as  
a command-line argument

Your preprocessor de-dents the code.  Tracebacks will still be meaningful,  
because you are not changing line numbering.  BTW, The code-folding in ViM  
can be set to correspond to indent-level, which means you can fold and  
unfold all constructs to a specific depth.  Magic.

Python makes me very lazy.  Writing a report in LaTeX today, it was  
actually easier for me to make up a syntax for tagging math symbols (put  
into comments in the LaTeX source), and extract those and build a List Of  
Symbols with a python preprocessor before texification,  rather than find  
(and figure out how to use) the correct LaTeX package for that.  More  
magic.



On 13 Oct 2004 20:28:00 -0700, valued customer <scooterm at hotmail.com>  
wrote:

>> > Is there a way in python to indicate that you want your
>> > "base level of indentation" to be four spaces instead of
>> > zero?
>
>> I don't think so.  Just out of curiosity, why would you want to do that?
>
> The question was just to make sure I hadn't overlooked some
> feature or setting of the programming language that would enable
> what I had asked about (short of introducing any of the various
> language constructs that we all can imagine and you need not
> elaborate here).
>
> As far as 'why would anyone want to do that' one reason that
> never fails is *personal preference* ... there probably isn't
> a stylistic or programming practice in existence that can't be
> explained at least partially by that. Therefore if someone asks,
> there must be at least *that* reason.
>
> For those who are not satisfied with that kind of answer, here
> is an example:
>
> Suppose you are editing source code in such a way
> that you only want *comments* to be flush left, and the rest of
> the code to be indented.
>
> (but Why would you want do that?)
>
> Because you work with a text editor that shows an 'outline'
> of your code based on the indentation, and you want the outline
> structure to be reflected in the comments.
>
> ### documentation
>     """ This is a python script that does some stuff.
>     Not only does it do stuff, it's documented stuff.
>     """
> ### initialize python
>     import foo
>     import bar
>
> ### do some stuff
>     print foo.frobilize()
>
> ### do some other stuff
>     print bar.babelize()
>
> ### end of python
>
>
> Yes the question may remain ... why would anyone wanna do
> that? Well, there are reasons. Whatever the justifications
> may be, the 'additional language statements' workaround will
> apparently have to suffice.
>
> Thanks for the input though.