allow line break at operators

[Seebs]

On 2011-08-12, rantingrick <rantingrick at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is with you guys and this need to have your hand held to read
> code.

Good question!  Great to see that the helpful and welcoming community
is living up to its reputation.

My brain has quirks.  Some people call them defects, some don't, but it
really doesn't matter; there are things about which my brain is just plain
unreliable and I rely moderately heavily on extra visual cues to reduce
the frequency with which I get things wrong when skimming.

> Out-dents are noise and nothing more.

Not for me.

> When you're driving on a
> two lane highway that becomes one lane, would you forget to merge
> (OUTDENT) simply because the "merge sign" was missing?

No, because the *LANE BOUNDARIES* would move.

> If you did then
> i would say you need to keep your eyes on the road (CODE) instead of
> looking for signs on the side of the road. In other words; you need to
> start acting like an intelligent agent instead of a zombie.

Interesting theory.

I propose we extend it to expression processing in general.  Instead
of writing
	a = (x + y) * z
let's just write
	a = (x + y * z
It's obvious that no one would have needed to introduce parentheses here
unless they wanted to bind the + more closely than the *, so the ) is
just noise and not needed.

> Hmm, Python's exclusive use of indent/dedent for denoting blocks is
> rather unique in a world of braces (barring a few other less known
> languages). Removing that feature and replacing it with braces (or
> tags or whatever) would change the language significantly!

It would, but unless that's the only distinctive trait of the language,
I don't think it would make the language cease to be Python.

> Likewise allowing a directive like "use braces = True" would also be
> detrimental to our code bases. A language must always strive to remove
> ambiguities and multiplicity. Having more than one way to mark blocks
> is insanity. You never want to induce more overhead than necessary
> because such things are detrimental to work flow and language
> evolution.

Agreed.

> This statement leads me to believe you have very little experience
> with the Python language. Python has many wonderful attributes and
> design philosophies. Significant indentation is just ONE of many.

It was a reductio-ad-absurdum.

> I don't understand this need for braces. You yearn so badly to be
> dominated by them. Is this a psychological disorder, a Helsinki
> syndrome that you cannot shake? There is life after braces my friend,
> and the future is bright!

Man, you really love pushing them buttons, don't you?

You don't understand a thing.  Therefore... there is no such thing, anyone
who experiences life differently from you needs to be insulted?

> As much as we love people getting on board we are not about to
> sacrifice our strong beliefs in clean source code just so you and
> other hardwired C programmers will come along.

But you will happily insult people and call them names in order to
keep them from having anything to listen to?

> PS: I will admit that a few of our community members can be rather
> acerbic at times.

Yeah.  And the thing is...  This can't possibly lead to convincing people of
your position, so presumably the purpose is that you don't want anyone who
didn't start out agreeing with you to ever come to agree with you?  Why's
that?

-s
-- 
Copyright 2011, all wrongs reversed.  Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam at seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
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I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions.