statements and blocks

[John Mitchell]

On 28 Jan 2000, John Kochmar wrote:

> OK, I haven't seen this in the FAQ (Yeah, I did look ;^), and maybe I 
> just missed it, but someone at the Python conference (sorry, I forget
> which talk) brought up that you couldn't do:
> 
> 	print "a"
> 	print "b"
> 		print "c"
> 		print "d"
> 		print "e"
> 	print "f"
> 
> to visually set off a block of statements.  And ahort of forcing a different 
> scope though a conditional, loop, or some other scope modifier, I haven't 
> been able to create a block of statements in a seperate context.

I'd say just do the "if 1" think and deal with it:

       print "a"
       print "b"
       if 1:
            print "c"
            print "d"
            print "e"
       print "f"

I use this technique a *lot*, but mostly for testing: use "if 0" to take
code out, "if 1" to re-use it.  Its also useful as "if 0: xxx else: yyy".
One code change swaps two segments of code.

One talk at the conference ("Python for Scene and Model Description for
Computer Graphics") used too many pushes and pops.  I suggested using
tuple- or list-format to make things a little better.  Now that I think
about it, it would probably suck.  Hmph.


- j