how to avoid leading white spaces

rusi rustompmody at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 12:14:08 EDT 2011


On Jun 8, 7:38 pm, "ru... at yahoo.com" <ru... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 06/07/2011 06:30 PM, Roy Smith wrote:
>
>
>
> > On 06/06/2011 08:33 AM, rusi wrote:
> >>> Evidently for syntactic, implementation and cultural reasons, Perl
> >>> programmers are likely to get (and then overuse) regexes faster than
> >>> python programmers.
>
> > "ru... at yahoo.com" <ru... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> I don't see how the different Perl and Python cultures themselves
> >> would make learning regexes harder for Python programmers.
>
> > Oh, that part's obvious.  People don't learn things in a vacuum.  They
> > read about something, try it, fail, and ask for help.  If, in one
> > community, the response they get is, "I see what's wrong with your
> > regex, you need to ...", and in another they get, "You shouldn't be
> > using a regex there, you should use this string method instead...", it
> > should not be a surprise that it's easier to learn about regexes in the
> > first community.
>
> I think we are just using different definitions of "harder".
>
> I said, immediately after the sentence you quoted,
>
> >> At
> >> most I can see the Perl culture encouraging their use and
> >> the Python culture discouraging it, but that doesn't change
> >> the ease or difficulty of learning.
>
> Constantly being told not to use regexes certainly discourages
> one from learning them, but I don't think that's the same as
> being *harder* to learn in Python.  The syntax of regexes is,
> at least at the basic level, pretty universal, and it is in
> learning to understand that syntax that most of any difficulty
> lies.  Whether to express a regex as "/code (blue)|(red)/i" in
> Perl or "(r'code (blue)|(red)', re.I)" in Python is a superficial
> difference, as is, say, using match results: "$alert = $1' vs
> "alert = m.group(1)".
>
> A Google for "python regular expression tutorial" produces
> lots of results including the Python docs HOWTO.  And because
> the syntax is pretty universal, leaving the "python" off that
> search string will yield many, many more that are applicable.
> Although one does get some "don't do that" responses to regex
> questions on this list (and some are good advice), there are
> also usually answers too.
>
> So I think of it as more of a Python culture thing, rather
> then being actually harder to learn to use regexes in Python
> although I see how one can view it your way too.


... this is the old nature vs nurture debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture



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