Editing tabular data [was: PEP8 79 char max]

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 2013-07-31, Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>>> I don't understand.  That just moves them to a different file --
>>> doesn't it?  You've still got to deal with editing a large table of
>>> data (for example when I want to add instructions to your assembler).
>>
>> My guess is it would be more foolproof to edit that stuff with a
>> spreadsheet.
>
> Many years ago, I worked with somebody who used a spreadsheet like
> that.  I tried it and found it to be way too cumbersome. The overhead
> involved of putting tables in to slew of different files and starting
> up LibreOffice to edit/view them is huge compared to just editing them
> with emacs in a file along with the source code.  Maybe my computer is
> too old/slow.  Maybe it's just due to how bad I am at Excel/LibreOffice...

I'm glad someone else feels that way!

At work, we have a number of CSV files (at my boss's insistence; I
would much rather they be either embedded in the source, or in some
clearer and simpler format) which I like to manipulate in SciTE,
rather than OO/LibreOffice. (I'll not distinguish those two. Far as
I'm concerned, they're one product with two names.) My boss can't
understand why I do this. I can't understand why he objects to having
to edit code files to alter internal data. I have pointed him to [1]
but to no avail.

The one thing I would do, though, is align with tabs rather than
spaces. That gives you an 8:1 (if you keep your tabs at eight, which I
do) improvement in maintainability, because edits that don't cross a
boundary don't require fiddling with the layout.

[1] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Soft_Coding.aspx

ChrisA