On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 09:52:57AM +0100, Piers Cawley wrote:
> You know, I'm trying to see what's annoying about all those
> parentheses in the lisp function and what do you know, I can't see
> anything wrong. Okay, so it's not Perl syntax, but it's still clear
> what's going on.
I'd go further than that.
It's clear what's going on for a number of reasons. Firstly, you know the
language. Secondly, you know what it's trying to do because the function and
the variables are well named. Thirdly, I used whitespace and indentation to
make the various levels apparent - that's why I removed the whitespace on the
second example.
There are many other tricks for making code readable, and whether or not the
language supports bracketing or, indeed, any other feature is more or less
irrelevant to all of them. You can write clear code in any language, if you
take the time; you can write Python in any language, if you want.
Readability is a programmer feature, not a language feature.
--
"There is no statute of limitations on stupidity."
-- Randomly produced by a computer program called Markov3.
