From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2004-01-09T13:01:43+09:00
Subject: Re: block delimiting

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 05:58:19 +0900, Pete Yadlowsky wrote:
> On Thursday 08 January 2004 03:46 pm, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> I chose not to learn Python because of the crap called syntactically
>> significant whitespace.
> I avoided Python also, for the same reason. Then one day I decided to
> dive in and learn it anyway in spite of myself. And I found I rather
> liked it.

Note that there are other reasons that I will not touch Python unless paid a 
LOT of money to do so, but the SSW is one of the biggest reasons I won't 
even bother. It forces me to think like the interpreter and does not let me
work the way that I want to. The example that I have always used is when I 
am doing "temporary" debugging, I will often put debug statements flush left 
-- they are, after all, trace points that I want to easily and quickly 
remove. I don't want "if DEBUG" with them; they are mandatory for this type
of debugging.

> The taboo of significant whitespace turned out to be a big non-
> issue very early in my study. I'd been coding that way for years anyway,
> just with superfluous block delimiters of various sorts. Python made them
> unnecessary. It's my hope that Ruby might keep them that way. Then it
> will be perfect.

What makes them superfluous? If there are good reasons to indent 
*differently* than the standard indentation, and I have found reasons to do 
so, then you do NOT want a new scope created just because you've indented 
differently. More importantly, you don't want scope *changed* because of 
that. Ruby with whitespace-based scope blocks will be Ruby without me.

>> Python's blocking solves the problem of readable
>> code the wrong way.
> What's the right way?

Style guides. It's not up to the interpreter to tell me what my style should 
be. I find that most Ruby is quite readable, and its interpreter doesn't try 
to tell me my style, with limited exceptions (e.g., "foo(" vs "foo ("; only 
the former is legal).

-austin
--
austin ziegler    * austin@halostatue.ca * Toronto, ON, Canada
software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2004.01.08
                                         * 22.51.48