do people really complain about significant whitespace?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Stephen Kellett wrote:
> In message <1155133454.975325.237770 at b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>, Carl
> Banks <pavlovevidence at gmail.com> writes
>> Stephen Kellett wrote:
>> I don't really understand how a closing brace helps here.  Care to
>> explain why it helps you?
> 
>> (Deeply nested long functions are evil anyways.  If you have such a
> 
> I didn't write deeply nested. I wrote multiple levels of indentation.
> They are not the same thing (they can be, but they don't have to be). A
> lot of code gets to 3 or 4 levels of indentation quite easily. I
> wouldn't call that deeply nested, not by a long shot.
> 
> To answer your first question: In C++/Ruby/Pascal you'd have something
> like this
> 
> function()
> {
>         loop1()
>         {
>                 blah
>                 blah
> 
>                 loop2()
>                 {
>                         blah
> 
>                         loop3()
>                         {
>                                 blah
>                         }
> 
>                         blah
>                 }
>         }
> 
>         otherloop()
>         {
>                 blah
>         }
> }
> 
> and in Python that gets to
> 
> function()
>         loop1()
>                 blah
>                 blah
> 
>                 loop2()
>                         blah
> 
>                         loop3()
>                                 blah
> 
>                         blah3
> 
>         otherloop()
>                 blah
> 
> I really dislike that the end of loop2  is implicit rather than
> explicit. 

<nitpicking>
Well, one can argue that since Python grammar defines that a code block
ends with the first following non-blank line that one indentation level
less, it's perfectly explicit !-)
</nitpicking>

But practically speaking :
> If its implicit you have to look for it. 

Indeed. And yes, I agree that it's not that good wrt/ readability for
any complex or long block.

OTOH, nothing prevents you to add a "# end <block>" comment where
appropriate - FWIW, I used to do it in C after the closing brace for any
lengthy block (and code blocks tend to be longer in C than in Python).