mdj wrote:
On Mar 5, 9:35 pm, apple2fr...@gmail.com wrote:On Mar 5, 3:18 pm, mdj <mdj....@gmail.com> wrote:> On Mar 5, 4:07 pm, apple2fr...@gmail.com wrote:
I write Python as my day job. The one thing I'll give it, is that you never again have to read badly formatted code, since indentation is used as the block delimiter instead of language symbols.
I've always liked this approach to bracketing, since encountering
it in the 1970s as the "off-side rule" (meaning that when indenting
jumped back to the left ("off-side"), the intervening levels of
structure were "closed").
I've often wondered why it wasn't more common, since it makes the
code "mean" exactly the way it looks.
I once "inherited" the maintenance of a text formatting tool written
in Cobol (!), so I had to learn Cobol on the fly. I was astonished
to learn that in this "easy" language, the presence or absence of
a single period in the middle of a nest of IF statements would
completely alter the IF nesting without causing any syntax errors!
What a violation of the "least surprise" principle, when a flyspeck
can make one program read like another!
-michael
******** Note new website URL ********
NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/
"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."