Firstly, I am the kind of guy who likes tabs over spaces, because I don't like forcing my particular preferences on to other people. To wax poetic, I like to give other people the freedom of choosing how they want their code indented. This of course brings me into the firing line of python programmers, for whom the 4-spaces-per-indentation-level is equivalent to the Ten Commandments handed down from Mount Sinai. Officially, python doesn't care, but thats like saying officially the Church accepts evolution.
I was editing a working python file written by some one else today, and wanted to convert it to tabs (yes yes, I know all about leaving files as I found them etc. Silence). So I ran unexpand -t 4 on the file. This simply replaces 4 spaces with one tab. This should have given me a working and correct python file though now indented with tabs. Naturally (Moore's law and all) this is not happened. The newly tab-indented file was riddled with errors because the original file was not indented properly so the simple conversion did not work. And as I go about fixing the errors python threw at me, I realised to my horror that information about the structure of the code was corrupted. Because python interprets code structure based on indentation, if your indentation is incorrect, your code is incorrect.
In comparison, a brace using language like C would have made the corrections trivial, because the braces explicitly specify the code structure. Python's argument that everyone indents anyway and thus braces are redundant is flawed - braces are not redundant because braces represent the separation of content from presentation, something that has been hammered into developers. In ignoring this, python has allowed a new class of errors - changing the appearance of code will now change the function of the code. I really can't see how this is a good thing.
If nothing else, python's integration of presentation and content, and thus presentation and program correctness makes it a far less robust language than brace using languages. Less robust in that a mangled python file is unrecoverable unless you actually read the code to figure out its structure, and that incorrectly transcribed python will likely run anyway with no syntactic or runtime errors.
Consider for example, the following code:
for n in names:
foo(n)
bar(n)
If you were transcribing the code and accidentally did not indent bar(n), the code now does something complete different yet no syntax or runtime error will be thrown. Now if the above code used braces, then it would have no effect. And if you forgot the brace, a syntax error will be thrown.
To be fair, python is a lovely language, and I do love it and use it extensively. Whitespace-as-syntax stance appeared at first to be a great idea, and one which now appears to be short sighted and naive. If nothing else, at least an interpreter which disallows incorrect space-indent files, that way tab->space and space->tab conversions would work correctly all the time.
Let me now put on my flame retardant undies, and you can flame away
Cheers,
Steve
Labels: code, computer, python, rant, software
