Necessity of ``pass''

Robert Roy rjroy at takingcontrol.com
Wed Aug 25 08:48:35 EDT 1999


On 23 Aug 1999 23:32:44 +0200, forcer <forcer at mindless.com> wrote:

...
I work in an environment where we several programmers working in
Python and we maintain each other's code. 

If I see the following, I can (usually safely) assume that the
programmer did not want any action taken on the if statement.  
>
>	if foo:
>	   pass
>	bar
>

Faced with the following, I can make no such assumption. Hmm maybe
there is a missing indent, Maybe I wrote this on an older editor and
used different tab settings, etc..... From a maintenance point of view
this construct is utterly ambiguous. 
>
>	if foo:
>	bar
>

The small savings incurred is not worth the maintenance headache that
would follow.

Robert Roy
rjroy-nospam at takingcontrol.com




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