On Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:40:05 -0800, piterrr.dolinski wrote: >> > if (some statement): # short form >> > >> > rather than >> > >> > if (some statement == true): # long form >> >> >> What all those ugly brackets are for? >> >> > Mark, > > Back in the day when C was king, or take many newer long established > languages (C#, Java),
Python is older than either C# or Java. Why have those languages paid no attention to the innovations of Python, instead of copying the misfeatures of C? Pascal and Algol and Fortran are older than C. Why did C introduce unnecessary brackets when these older languages did not need them? > the use of () has been widespread and mandated by > the compilers. I have never heard anyone moan about the requirement to > use parentheses. You have not been paying attention. In many ways, C has been a curse on programming. It has trained large numbers of coders to expect and *demand* poor syntax. > Now come Python in which parens are optional, and all > of a sudden they are considered bad and apparently widely abandoned. Do > you really not see that code with parens is much more pleasing visually? That's funny. Perhaps you should be programming in Lisp. > I could understand someone's reluctance to use parens if they are very > new to programming and Pythons is their first language. But my > impression here is that most group contributors are long-time > programmers and have long used () where they are required. Again, I'm > really surprised the community as a whole ignores the programming > "heritage" and dumps the parens in a heartbeat. (Because they are unnecessary) (visual noise) (that don't add anything) (useful) (to the reader's understanding) (of the code). -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
