On 19 January 2016 at 14:40, Alexander Walters <tritium-list@sdamon.com> wrote:
On 1/18/2016 23:27, Greg Ewing wrote:
Brett Cannon wrote:
For me, I don't see how::
if (x != 10) return NULL; do_some_more();
is any clearer or more readable than::
if (x != 10) { return NULL; } do_some_more();
Maybe not for that piece of code on its own, but the version with braces takes up one more line. Put a few of those together, and you can't fit as much code on the screen. If it makes the difference between being able to see e.g. the whole of a loop at once vs. having to scroll up and down, it could make the code as a whole harder to read.
When someone trying to make this argument in #python for Python code... the response is newlines are free. Almost this entire thread has me confused - the arguments against are kind of hypocritical; You are developing a language with a built in design ethic, and ignoring those ethics while building the implementation itself.
There are two conflicting code aesthetics at work here, and the relevant one for the folks that prefer to avoid braces in C where they can is:
from __future__ import braces File "<stdin>", line 1 SyntaxError: not a chance
So if we bring *Python* into the comparison, we can see it splits the difference between the two C variants by omitting the closing brace and replacing the opening brace with ":": x = do_something() if (x != 10): return None do_some_more() The additional "cost" of mandatory braces in C is thus more lines containing only a single "}", while the benefit is simply not having to think about the braceless variant as a possible alternative spelling. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia