Why not allow empty code blocks?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 12:00 AM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 23/07/2016 12:34, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 9:13 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> One less thing to be programmed, one less thing for the user to
>>>> remember. Just require pass any time you have an empty block, rather
>>>> than try to remember where it is required and were it is optional.
>>>
>>>
>>> Actually, the requirement of a dummy statement is a slight annoyance for
>>> the programmer. After deleting a statement, you must see if you have to
>>> put in a pass statement. And after adding a statement, you may feel the
>>> urge to remove the redundant pass statement.
>>
>>
>> How often do you actually need empty statements, adding stuff,
>> removing stuff, like that? Possibly there's a code smell here.
>
>
> All the time?

No, or I wouldn't have qualified it with the very weak "possibly".

> For example when creating a set of empty functions to be populated later, or
> empty branches of if and so on to be filled in as so you go.

Forget 'pass' - just give each function a docstring. That
syntactically defines the block, and it's useful.

> Or, for debugging or other reasons, when you need to comment out the
> contents of a block. Then pass needs to be added.

How often do you comment out an entire block and not its header? I
don't remember the last time I did that. It's certainly not so common
that adding 'pass' takes up a significant part of a debugging session.

ChrisA