On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 6:27 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > You've never noticed the masses of code written in text books, blogs, web > pages, discussion forums like this one, etc.? > > Real world code for production is usually messy and complicated and filled > with data validation and error checking code. There's a lot of code without > that, because it was written explicitly to be read by humans, and the fact > that it may be executed as well is incidental. Some code is even written in > pseudo-code that *cannot* be executed. It's clear to me that a non-trivial > amount of code is specifically written to be consumed by other humans, not > by machines.
Yes, I'm aware of the quantities of code that are primarily for human consumption. But in the original context, which was of editing code six months down the track, I still believe that such code is primarily for the machine. In that situation, there are times when it's not worth the hassle of writing beautiful code; you'd do better to just get that code generated and in operation. Same goes for lint tools and debuggers - sometimes, it's easier to just put the code into a live situation (or a perfect copy of) and see where it breaks, than to use a simulation/test harness. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
