Neil Cerutti wrote: > On 2006-12-13, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Try reading again. In Lisp, you use () and *your editor* > > automatically indents according to the universal standard, or > > you leave it sloppy until other folks reading your code > > convince you to get a proper programming editor. Indentation > > does not get out of sync with semantics because the editor > > virtually never misses parentheses that the Lisp compiler sees. > > Expressions keep the same meaning even if you have to start > > breaking them across lines, etc. > > Yes, it's the same way in Python. Of course, not everything is an > expression in Python, so it's not saying quite as much.
I fail to see how it is the same in Python. I go into a Lisp buffer white-space area, and press <Tab> and absolutely nothing changes about my program. There are two reasons for this: I am using a dumb editor that puts a Tab in that my compiler doesn't care about, or I am using the moral equivalent of Emacs, which reads <Tab> as "put this line on the standard Lisp indentation level, as determined by the non-whitespace characters in the area." In Python, I hit that <Tab> and the smartest editor in the world would have to say "Oh, you want to put this line on a different indentation level, possibly including this line as part of the if: consequences block above. Hope that helps!" > > In Python, you group in your mind, and press indentation keys > > to make it happen in your editor. The editor cannot help that > > much, because it cannot read your mind. White space screwups in > > copy-paste cannot be fixed by the editor automatically, because > > it cannot read the original programmer's mind, and you have to > > fix it manually, and risk screwing it up. > > It is very easy a manual process, possibly as simple as selecting > the correct s-expr and pasting it into the right place in your > code. How does a manual correction process come out as simple as "don't bother fixing the indentation if you don't care."? This is exactly the questionable math that I was questioning in the original post. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
