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What does Python fix?

François Pinard pinard at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu Jan 17 11:12:43 EST 2002 
[Mark McEahern]

> As for Lisp's parentheses, I've never used Lisp, but when I look at
> examples, I have to control my overwhelming desire to vomit when I see that
> profusion of parentheses.

Of course, whoever reads LISP code (and I still like LISP, even if I prefer
Python) looks at the indentation to understand it, not the parentheses.
Your editor looks at the parentheses and translates these into proper
indentation.  Some LISP editors are quite good at this jobs.  In a word,
for me at least, both Python and LISP need proper indentation to be readable.

Parentheses still need to be looked at for deciphering a single line,
while Python often does not have equivalent devices to batch many things
on one line.  It sometimes make that LISP code is a bit more compact than
equivalent Python.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard
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