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[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

On 02 Nov 2010 17:58:06 GMT
Seebs <usenet-nospam at seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-11-02, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net> wrote:
> > "No one
> > knows why" email is being "magically" transformed?
> 
> Yay for a large company IT department with both MS and Blackberry
> stuff involved.

"Large" is no excuse for incompetency.

> > Your editor has a
> > mind of its own?  Yikes!
> 
> It is extremely useful to me to have spaces converted to tabs
> for every other file I edit.

So configure it to recognize Python files and act accordingly.

> No, they aren't.  See... That would work *if I knew for sure what the intent
> was*.
> 
> 	if foo:
> 	    bar
> 	else:
> 	    baz
> 	    quux
> 
> Does it look right?  We have *no idea*, because we don't actually know
> whether quux was *intended* to be in the else branch or whether that's a typo.

And C has the same problem.

    if (foo)
        bar;
    else
        baz;

        quux;

Is quux meant to be part of the else clause?  The writer's indentation
suggests "yes" but the code says "no".

> So the only way I can figure that out is by fully figuring out the function

Same is true for the C code.  In both cases you can tell what the code
will do (modulo weird macros in the C code) but the intention is
impossible to determine without mind reading abilities in both cases.
We do know that the Python code *appears* to be doing exactly what the
author intended and the C code *appears* to not be.

In either case, <syntax checker> != <debugger>.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net>         |  Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/                |  and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.