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On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 08:11 -0800, sjdevnull@yahoo.com wrote:
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">Bill Atkins wrote:</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> > On the plus side, Python makes less demands on the</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> > capabilities of the editor. All you really need</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> > is block-shifting commands. Bracket matching is</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> > handy for expressions but not vital, and you</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> > certainly don't need bracket-based auto-indenting.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">></FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> Oh, please. So we should restrict the power of the languages we</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">> choose just to make sure that our code can be edited in Notepad?</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">In the real world, it's a non-negligible consideration, IMO. I find</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">myself needing to write code on machines that aren't my usual dev</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">machine at least a couple of times a year, and not having to install a</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">particular editor is nice (especially in terms of keeping the</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">modifications to someone else's machine down to a minimum).</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">It's hardly a dealbreaker for a particular language, but it's far from</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">worthless.</FONT>
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For the most part, editing Python isn't an issue, but I think it's a fallacy to claim that significant whitespace has no impact on editing and refactoring. There's a reason indent-region doesn't work for Python code in Emacs (and probably never will - I consider the hopefully uncommon practice of putting "pass" statements at the end of blocks marginally silly). There was a time (many years ago) when I used this feature of Emacs to catch indentation errors in C code. Just run indent-region on the entire file and you get a fast visual indication of where you misplaced a brace. Trying this on Python code would require you to restore from a backup file.<BR>
Another example is copying and pasting from external sources (web pages for instance) where the indentation gets totally screwed. In a language with block delimiters this is fixed with a couple keystrokes in Emacs. In Python it requires manually comparing each line with the original (or typing it in manually to begin with).<BR>
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I *like* the significant whitespace in Python but let's not pretend there isn't at least a small penalty. And I strongly suspect Python's varied syntactical rules impose far more of a "load" on code editors than Lisp does (it certainly offers more opportunity for the editor to do the wrong thing). <BR>
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Regards,<BR>
Cliff<BR>
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