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Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

Doug Tolton doug at nospam.com
Tue Oct 7 17:21:27 EDT 2003 
On 7 Oct 2003 12:59:07 -0700, hanzspam at yahoo.com.au (Hannu Kankaanp??)
wrote:

>prunesquallor at comcast.net wrote in message news:<8ynx6tb1.fsf at comcast.net>...
>> hanzspam at yahoo.com.au (Hannu Kankaanp??) writes:
>> > So getting to the point, doesn't the example show that indentation
>> > is in fact a *good* choice for block delimiting? It's an alternative that
>> > wouldn't have the subtle bug you introduced here. So how can you
>> > claim that this example shows indentation is a poor choice for block
>> > delimiting? It doesn't make sense.
>> 
>> The point was that even though I screwed up the indentation, it was
>> easily discovered and repaired with Emacs.  If the program were
>> whitespace-sensitive, then the screwed-up version would be
>> mechanically indistinguishable from the intended one.

>How do you "screw up indentation"? Actually, being more of a
>Python fan, I though you had screwed up parens, since indentation
>is absolute for me :). Anyway, do you just go to some line and start
>pressing spacebar randomly, and not notice this? Maybe
>you do need a safety net, then.
>

Maybe by coding in an environment with multiple programmers?
Alex was saying that Python's syntax and simplicity is so much better
for large scale projects with multiple programmers.  With just 4
programmers using Python at work we have problems with indentation
levels.  One guy (me) uses emacs, another uses ultra-edit, another
uses Boa and the other uses PythonWin.  Indenting can be a major
source of compilation bugs.

>But the whitespace already has all the structural information needed.
>The whitespace doesn't just disappear suddenly, much like parens don't
>magically disappear or mutate.
>
>There can be problems in cutting and pasting code if one mixes tabs
>and spaces, like Ingvar said, but generally the rule in Python is to
>use 4 spaces for each indentation level. If you break this rule,
>you know you had it coming when something fails ;).

Just because it's defined that way, doesn't make it less a pain in the
ass to fix the problems.

of course it's not a big problem if you are the only consumer of your
code.


Doug Tolton
(format t "~a@~a~a.~a" "dtolton" "ya" "hoo" "com")
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