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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Jan 4 05:10:37 CET 2012

Benjamin Peterson writes:

Ethan Furman <ethan stoneleaf.us> writes:

Readability also includes more than just the source code; as has already been stated:

[diffs elided]

I find the diff version that already had braces in place much more readable.

There are much larger problems facing diff readibility. On your basis, we might as well decree that code should never be arranged or reindented.

That's a reasonable approach sometimes used, but it would be hard in Python. Specifically, I often produce two patches when substantial rearrangement is involved. The first isolates the actual changes, the second does the reformatting.

In Python, the first patch might be syntactically erroneous, which would be both annoying for automatic testing and less readable. A Python-friendly alternative is to provide both a machine-appliable diff and a diff ignoring whitespace changes. This could be a toggle in web interfaces to the VCS. I've also sometimes found doing word diffs to be useful.

Most developers resist such procedures passionately, though. shrug

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