how to reduce bugs due to incorrect indentation

[msustik at gmail.com]

On Thursday, February 6, 2014 12:29:36 PM UTC-8, Roel Schroeven wrote:
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> My suggestion: configure your editor to insert the appropriate amount of 
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> spaces instead of a tab when you press the tab key.

You misunderstood the problem, but managed to start a Tab war! :-)

My emacs inserts 4 spaces in python mode when I press the tab key. Python uses the indentation to decide how many lines following the else are executed in the else branch or after the else branch (always that is).

By pressing inadvertently the Tab key I changed the semantics of the code while it is still syntactically correct and PEP8 compliant. This was indeed a user error and my question was towards practices reducing the chance of this happening again.

Based on the responses I arrived to the conclusion that there is no better solution than trying to be careful and have good testing suites.

It would be possible to disable the Tab key completely and type in the spaces all the time. (It is much less likely that one would press the space bar accidentally four times or hold it down to get 4 spaces by mistake.)

Unfortunately this means giving up the indentation help of the editor and that will slow down coding. It will also lead to many indentation mistakes during development (most of which will be caught right away however. Maybe a coloring of the background based on tab position could assist in this.

I also considered adding an extra blank line after the if-else block (similarly for loops) in the hope that it would reduce the chance of missing an inadvertent indentation after the block.

However, this defeats somewhat the python paradigm that got rid of closing braces and endif-s etc. used in other languages to allow more compact code.

-Matyas


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> Best regards,
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> Roel
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> -- 
> 
> "Met een spitsvondig citaat bewijs je niets."
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>          -- Voltaire