On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:38:37 -0800, Robert Kern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > James Stroud wrote: > > On Friday 25 March 2005 08:39 am, Ivan Van Laningham wrote: > > > >>As far as grouping by indentation goes, it's why I fell in love with > >>Python in the first place. Braces and so on are just extraneous cruft > >>as far as I'm concerned. It's the difference between Vietnamese verbs > >>and Latin verbs;-) > > > > > > Say I buy into the indentation ideology. Python then has this > > inconsistency: : > > > > Why do we need : at the end of our if and for loops? I spend approximately 6 > > minutes/100 lines of code going back and finding all of the times I missed > > :. > > Is it for cheating? > > > > if False: print ":" > > > > Now, what happened to the whitespace idea here? This code seems very > > unpythonic. I think : is great for slices and lamda where things go on one > > line, but to require it to specify the start of a block of code seems a > > little perlish. > > During the usability studies for the language ABC, which Guido worked on > before developing Python and also used indentation for grouping, it was > found that the colon improved readability. > > I don't know what those studies said about the frequency of people > forgetting to put in the colon. Anecdotally, I can say that I do it very > rarely. >
I can't remember having ever done it, although I am sure I have. The real question is, though, 6 minutes per 100 lines of code? There probably aren't more than 30 lines out of those 100 that should end in a colon. Assuming you forget half your colons, you're spending upwards of 20 seconds per colon? If you want, I'll write a script that checks for colons at the end of lines before increased indentation, and asks you if you want to put one there - I could save you 5.8 minutes per 100 lines of code. How's that for a productivity boost? Peace Bill Mill bill.mill at gmail.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
