for -- else: what was the motivation?

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2022-10-09 12:34:22 -0400, Avi Gross wrote:
> I have seen programmers who have taken an elegant pipeline I have built
> apart and made it into many lines of code reassignment the value of each
> step to the same or different variables and other ways of lengthening or
> obscuring my intent.

I have certainly done that (not with your code, AFAIK). The problem with
those beautiful one-liners is that they are really hard to debug. So if
I can't convince myself that they are correct just by reading them I
have to split them over multiple lines so I can add breakpoints or log
messages. Of course I could put it together again afterwards, but I
would argue that if I didn't understand it the first time it's probably
better to leave it in its more verbose and debuggable state.

Of course I have also done the opposite: Taken some messy and
complicated code and simplified it into a simple generator expression.
In fact I would say that I code tends to be shorter after I fixed a bug
than before.


> So although size may matter, so can sighs.

:-)

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) |                    |
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         |    -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |       challenge!"
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