From: James Britt <james.britt@...>
Date: 2008-10-07T03:44:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Why not adopt "Python Style" indentation for Ruby?

Frasier Mruby wrote:

Why not adopt "Python Style" indentation for Ruby?   Because that would 
  bite a big one.

> 
> I am fine to have "END" for class or methods. But for IF,WHILE, CASE, 
> FOR, etc., when there are many levels it often make me confused what the 
> matching part of the those "END"s are.

Then don't do that.  Seriously.  Twisty conditionals is a code smell. 
(Having fought with deep hierarchies of YAML and HAML, the lack of an 
explicit "end" token doesn't really help in complex documents; in fact, 
it can be detriment.  Sometimes explicit is better than implicit.)


BTW, doesn't your code editor find the matching braces (or do/ends) for 
you?  (If not, get a real editor.  They're free.)

> To enhance readability is probably one of ruby's design purpose and I 
> really hope some thing could be done earlier to make the "END" looks 
> prettier.

I *rarely* run into Ruby code that is not readable.  When I do, it's 
almost always for a reason (e.g. Camping source code, or some code 
golfing).

The idea that coders need to be coerced into writing readable code is as 
flawed as that of the need for Java-style static typing to avoid bugs.

It sounds good in blog posts and mailing lists, but lacks empirical 
evidence.


-- 
James Britt

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