On Sat, 02 Jan 2010 10:42:39 +0000, Duncan Booth wrote: > Donn <donn.in...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Saturday 02 January 2010 00:02:36 Dan Stromberg wrote: >>> I put together a page about significant whitespace (and the lack >>> thereof). >> The only thing about Python's style that worries me is that it can't be >> compressed like javascript can*, and perhaps that will prevent it >> becoming a browser-side language one day. How I'd love to code PyQuery >> instead of JQuery! > > You can do simple white-space removal as easily in Python as in > Javascript, you just need to maintain a minimal indentation and as you > don't need Javascript's curly braces there probably isn't must > difference especially once the code has been gzipped for transfer to the > browser.
I don't understand why you would bother removing whitespace, particularly if you're going to gzip the file anyway. I've just picked one of my modules at random: about 47K in size, of which about 15K is whitespace. Compressed to .bz, it is 12K, and if I strip the whitespace from it first and then compress it, it is 11K. So, even though whitespace (spaces and newlines) make up about 30% of the original source, once compressed they represent only about 8%. Given the extra complexity of stripping whitespace, I don't know that it's worthwhile. It's not like you're going to reduce the download time from three hours to one; it's more like 2 seconds to 1.5. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
