New to Python - block grouping (spaces)

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 12:43 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> The key thing to make this work is that the tab needs to be a reasonably solid
> non-leaky abstraction for denoting an indent.
> As soon as you allow both tabs and spaces all the interminable bikeshedding starts
>

Whatever you change, there will be stuff for people to argue about.
Trust me, that's nothing to do with the nature of programming
languages... it's about the nature of people.

> In many ways this is like the browser wars.
> If browsers had been made like half-decent compilers then non-compliant html
> wouldn't render and would get corrected on short order.
> Instead browsers overreach themselves to be nice (to users) and end up being
> horrible to web-developers who now need to maintain 1 dozen browsers × 2 dozen versions.
>
> Likewise all the overreaching to be allow 'free-form' layout puts paid to all
> attempts at richer structure comprehending tools.
> As a quick example try this:
> You've a 10-file python project in which you want to replace function 'f'
> by function 'longname'
> How easy is it?
>
> I am ready to bet that if you use IE-ish its easy if you use classic editors
> not so.

If you have a ten-file project that's identifying a key function
globally as 'f', then you already have a problem. If your names are
more useful and informative, a global search-and-replace will do the
job.

What's your point, though? Somewhere along the way, you need to have
identifiers, and those identifiers need to explain *to the human* what
code you're referring to. Whether they're line labels in assembly
language, memory locations in machine code, linker relocation table
entries, fully-qualified module/class/method names, or simple flat
identifiers, they exist as much for the humans as for the compiler. If
you change the basic syscall from INT 21 to CALL __SYSTEM, everyone
who uses your code needs to change his/her *head* to cope with your
change. There is fundamentally no tool which can do this for you.

You can add a level of indirection to program loading by having the
function name turn into some sort of internal identifier when you save
the source file, and then you can rename the function in one place.
Great! But somehow you still need to have humans recognize which
functions they want to call. Do they have to point-and-click to pick a
function? I've used IDEs like that, and they are a pain.

ChrisA