Re: Pythonic indentation (or: beating a dead horse)

Well, I found one of those breaches of etiquette I was worried
about... apparently wrapping my lines at 80 characters was not a good
idea. Sigh.

On May 19, 2:59=A0pm, Joel VanderWerf <[e-mail]> wrote:
> John McCain, is that you? ;)

C'mon, you know perfectly well that John McCain can't use a
computer. :P

> > word "end", you have a problem with conciseness. I recognize that
> > syntactically-
>
> A line consisting of just /\s+end/ is of very low complexity, however.

Takes up just as much vertical space on the screen as the most complex
line you'll ever see. And even so... very low complexity or not, it's
_unnecessary_, which means any degree of complexity above zero is bad.

> > This is *not* DRY. Or anything remotely resembling it. This is an
> > ugly blemidh on a language that otherwise is very beautiful.
>
> It's a blemish all right, but not on the language.

If not the language, then where? In the library code? Maybe those four
places where "end" is repeated seven consecutive times are poorly
engineered and could be refactored, but how about the nearly thousand
times "end" is repeated three or more times? Is every one of those the
result of poor engineering on the part of the library programmers, or
were at least some of them forced on the programmers by the language?

One statistic that I didn't print out from my script was that there
are an average of 135 lines of "end" per file. For a language that
prides itself on expressiveness and brevity, this is just plain silly.

--J