Compare source code

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:24:03 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2010-11-01, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand>
> wrote:
[...]
>> I'm getting less and less keen on that particular feature of Python...
> 
> Why?
> 
> Other languages have similar problems if you remove salient bits of
> syntax before comparing two source files files.
> 
> For exmaple, if you remove all of the curly-braces from two C source
> files before comparing them, you don't get useful results.

Ah, but other languages don't make the guarantee that you can add or 
remove random whitespace in arbitrary places and still have code that 
works correctly!

Of course, neither does Python, but there's a certain type of personality 
that is never happy unless they are bitching and moaning, and if they 
can't find something more substantial to bitch and moan about, they'll 
bitch and moan about the fact that they can't make random changes to 
syntactically significant tokens in their source code without things 
breaking. Boo hoo, cry me a river.

Personally, I'm more disturbed by the default prompt in the interactive 
interpreter. >>> clashes with the symbol used for quoting text in email 
and news. That causes me far more distress than indentation.


Doing a bit of my own bitching and moaning'ly y'rs,


-- 
Steven