if, continuation and indentation

HH henrikho at gmail.com
Thu May 27 08:22:55 EDT 2010


I have a question about best practices when it comes to line wrapping/
continuation and indentation, specifically in the case of an if
statement.

When I write an if statement with many conditions, I prefer to use a
parenthesis around the whole block and get the implicit continuation,
rather than ending each line with an escape character.  Thus, using
the example from the style guide (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/
pep-0008/) I would write:

    if (width == 0 and
        height == 0 and
        color == 'red' and
        emphasis == 'strong' or
        highlight > 100):
        raise ValueError("sorry, you lose")

The problem should be obvious -- it's not easy to see where the
conditional ends and the statement begins since they have the same
indentation.  Part of the problem, I suppose, is that Emacs indents
'height' and the other lines in the conditional to 4 spaces (because
of the parenthesis).  How do people deal with this situation?

Thanks,
Henrik



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