the annoying, verbose self

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 23:38:24 +0000, BJörn Lindqvist
wrote:

> I like that a lot. This saves 12 characters for the original example and
> removes the need to wrap it.
> 
> 7            return math.sqrt(.x * .x + .y * .y + .z * .z)
> 
> +1 Readability counts, even on small screens.

-2 Readability counts, and your example is a lot less readable.

For your example to be even *slightly* readable, you have to fill the 
expression with excessive whitespace. A little bit of whitespace is good. 
Too much breaks the flow of the expression and hurts readability.

Or perhaps I should say:

T o o   m u c h   b r e a k s   t h e   f l o w . . . 


You write: math.sqrt(.x * .x + .y * .y + .z * .z)

which to my eyes has too much whitespace, but the alternative is worse:
math.sqrt(.x*.x + .y*.y + .z*.z)

and this is positively painful to try to read, it looks like line-noise:
math.sqrt(.x*.x+.y*.y+.z*.z)



The correct solution to your example is to get rid of the attribute 
lookups from the expression completely:


def abs(self):
    x, y, z = self.x, self.y, self.z
    return math.sqrt(x**2 + y**2 + z**2)


It's probably also faster, because it looks up the attributes only once 
each, instead of twice.



-- 
Steven.