Why not allow empty code blocks?

[bart4858 at gmail.com]

On Sunday, 31 July 2016 16:31:56 UTC+1, Steven D'Aprano  wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Jul 2016 08:18 pm, BartC wrote:

> The whole point of an optimizing compiler is that you don't have to detect
> patterns yourself. The compiler does it. There's a whole science to writing
> optimizing compilers these days, and they don't do it by hard-coding
> dedicated syntax for each thing you want to optimize. That's very 1970s.

Leaving out unneeded parts of a statement is not hand-optimising; it's just being sensible.

But actually Python is chock-full of dedicated features designed to allow you to be very productive without writing much code. (Which is handy for a bytecode language as it means a lot of things will execute in native code.)

Oddly people are much less keen on dedicated bits of syntax, even if it's a cut-down bit of something that's already there!


> Bart, I'm not putting you down for having no users. But your judgement of
> the pros and cons of a feature is biased one way because you only have to
> please yourself.

I'm suggesting ideas that originated in Algol68. Not widely used but not a one-person job either, and it is quite well regarded. (I love the syntax but don't care for the rest of it.)

> In that same thread, one of the lead Python devs Victor Stinner talks about
> some of his work on embedded devices where he has a hard limit of 128MB for
> *everything*: boot loader, kernel, OS, applications, etc.

(128MB or 128KB? In the 1980s we were all running in 64KB to 640KB of memory. 128MB might be what a well-endowed mainframe might have had!)

-- 
Bartc