[Python-Dev] PEP 7 clarification request: braces (original) (raw)

Tim Delaney timothy.c.delaney at gmail.com
Tue Jan 3 01:53:06 CET 2012

On 3 January 2012 09:55, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com>wrote:

On Jan 2, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Tim Delaney wrote: I'd also point out that if you're expecting braces, not having them can make the code less readable.

If a programmer's mind explodes when they look at the simple and beautiful examples in K&R's The C Programming Language, then they've got problems that can't be solved by braces ;-)

Now that's just hyperbole ;)

If you've got a mix of braces and non-braces in a chunk of code, it's very easy for the mind to skip over the non-brace blocks as not being blocks. I know it's not something I'm likely to mess up when reading the code in-depth, but if I'm skimming over trying to understand the gist of the code or looking for what should be an obvious bug, a block that's not brace-delimited is more likely to be missed than one that is (when amongst other blocks that are).

If we had the option of "just use indentation" in C I'd advocate that. Failing that, I find that consistent usage of braces is preferable.

Cheers,

Tim Delaney -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20120103/12e2e21f/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list