Why not allow empty code blocks?

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 10:11 AM,  <bart4858 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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!)

Yes, and we didn't have Python then. When I had a computer with 640KB
of memory, my options were (1) BASIC or (2) 8086 assembly language,
using DEBUG.EXE and its mini-assembler. Later on (much much later), I
added C to the available languages, but it was tedious and annoying,
because one tiny change meant minutes of compilation. Also, I had to
fit everything inside 20MB of hard disk space, which was shared with
my brother.

I'm not sure whether 128MB is work memory or total storage, but I
would suspect the latter. The idea of a sourceless Python distribution
isn't to cut down on RAM usage but storage, if I understand correctly.

ChrisA