Greg Ewing wrote:
spir wrote:
On the other side, the Oulipo school of writing believes that writing with apparently arbitrary constraints improves the results.
Oulipo games are about helping *creativity*.
I don't think this applies in the same way when you're writing a program. The goal there is *not* to be original and surprising -- if anything it's the opposite! You want to convey the meaning of the code to the reader as clearly as possible, and if it uses an idiom that the reader has seen before and can instantly recognise, then so much the better.
And therein, you have defeated your own argument. Given the large body of code that already follows PEP8 (and other style guides for other languages that commonly use an 80-character boundary), it is a common constraint which yields many common idioms (such as placing list items on separate lines with similar indention). The readers wished hard For the thread to die quickly Sadly it goes on -- Scott Dial scott@scottdial.com scodial@cs.indiana.edu