Re^4: I want you to convince me to learn Perl

[Ralesk]

It's not just the significant whitespace issue; though that is possibly the most frequently annoying.

I hear this way too often and I honestly don’t understand it.

If you already indent correctly (go one unit deeper in a sub-block, one unit shallower when the block ends — and unit is whatever, be it a tab or several spaces, as long as it’s consistent), you won’t even notice the language relies on indentation.

And I sure as hell hope you people indent properly in your non-python code too, already.

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That said, Python annoyed me with one thing that Perl — thankfully — doesn’t: run-time errors. Everything you can think of, is going to bite you during run. There’s no strict mode, no nothing to guard you against typos and such. Perl will very happily rattle its chains about stupid things that Python will remain completely oblivious about until you run into it while the code is in motion.

[BrowserUk]

I hear this way too often and I honestly don’t understand it.

If you already indent correctly (go one unit deeper in a sub-block, one unit shallower when the block ends — and unit is whatever, be it a tab or several spaces, as long as it’s consistent), you won’t even notice the language relies on indentation.

Look around at my code here and you'll see that I am very consistent -- almost anal -- about indentation in my code be it Perl, C whatever. But when I wrote python, it was just to damn easy to end up with:

	stuff here
 	more stuff here

Looks consistent, but is invisibly different. And that is puerile, pathetic and it f'ing annoys me. Frequently.

And quite frankly I don't give a flying fig whether you "hear this way too often". If you don't wanna "hear" it, don't read it.

[Ralesk]

Gosh, chill... didn’t mean to direct it at you in particular, but there’s simply been plenty of times I’ve heard it and I felt I’d say something about it.

I’m almost exclusively a Perl user, but I’ve spent a few years doing KDE3 stuff in Python, and I guess I just feel weird when people find the white-space thing odd while it felt pretty much natural for me simply because it’s merely about making proper indentation a rule. (Heh, now that I think of it, that even fits in the Zen of Python, “there should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it”)

[BrowserUk]

it’s merely about making proper indentation a rule.

Proper indentation is a visual thing.

A tab on one line, an errant space preceding a tab on the next; four spaces on the next; doesn't matter, everything lines up.

'cepting for one language.

Sure, its easy to be consistent when you first type code -- I have my editor set to convert tabs to 4 spaces on input for pretty much every programming language I use. But its when you pick up a piece of someone else's code who used a different convention; or you cut and paste between files; or grab a snippet off the 'net; or just move a bit of code from one level to another...

The only reliable method is to squelch every line and re-indent. Life's too damn short for such pointless, affected, self-inflicted make-work.

And maybe the reason you hear it so often, is cos its true.