[Tutor] creating and writing to a text file

[Cameron Simpson]

On 30Mar2021 09:23, Alan Gauld <learn2program at gmail.com> wrote:
>On 30/03/2021 07:18, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>> If you're talking about pyflakes, it's a linter:
>>     https://pypi.org/project/pyflakes/
>>
>> It actually promises to not complain about style :-)
>>
>I'm a big fan of linters but I hate formatters.

I have mixed feelings, but yapf can be tuned to very close to my 
preferred style anyway.

>There's very little evidence that strict code formatting makes much
>difference
>to comprehension

Aye, but I'm prone to trivial typos (spaces, etc) and poorly formatted 
code annoying me, doubly so when it is my own poorly formatted code. It 
_is_ very pleasing to me to have a computer apply that rigour for me.

>and in practice I find that different styles apply in
>different
>parts of the code specifically as a way of conveying meaning(*). Formatters
>tend to remove those variations.
>
>I avoid them like the plague!
>
>(*) an example would be building a menu system from a data structure,
>it makes sense to lay the data out to look like the menus. but in other
>places you want it to look like a flat data store. Most formatters
>insist on 
>lining everything up according to whatever scheme their author prefers
>(or if you are lucky a config setting)

Yes, this is true. Even yapf doesn't indent dict literals (for eg) as I 
want. It _does_ at least have a lexical cue in that a trailing comma 
lines all the values up vertically, and no trailing commas makes it fill 
the lines.

But I'll take it over hand aligning my code.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>