The whitespaceless frontend

[Chris Mellon]

On 4/26/06, Edward Elliott <nobody at 127.0.0.1> wrote:
> Sion Arrowsmith wrote:
> > Absolutely. I've written quite a lot of code (which I wasn't expecting
> > anyone else to maintain) using 'I' for the same reasons. Plus, it's
> > even shorter in terms of characters (if not keystrokes), stands out
> > reasonably well, and for how I read it makes for better English
> > grammar (eg I.send_response(...) -- I guess it depends on whether
> > you're doing the mental transformation of method call to message
> > passing).
>
> I didn't like 'I' because:
> 1. i don't like caps except for constants (which it sorta is, i guess)
> 2. it's too close to 'i' which is standard for temporary loop variables

I picked up a tip when I was working with C++ with regards to these
sort of indexes (which I don't use so much in Python anyway, but...)
and now use "ii", "jj" etc instead of just i. A single i is harder to
pick out an (because of how common i is in English) pretty much
impossible to search for. On the other hand, searching for (or
highlighting, with an appropriate editor) all instances of ii is much
more productive.

> 3. the bad grammar (for message passing) is all the fun!
>
> > I stopped doing this when I started (a) maintaining other people's
> > Python code, and having them maintain mine and (b) using editors
> > whose Python syntax highlighting coloured "self" as special.
> > "Readability counts" wins over a couple of extra characters.
>
> Sadly, tis true.  Which makes me wish they'd just hard-coded 'self' for the
> damn thing in the first place.  Nothing worse than knowing what you're
> missing.
>
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