Re: Structuring with whitespace in Python

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 02:41, John J. Boyer wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In Python program structure is indicated by indentation. doesn't this make 
> debugging difficult, since a missing tab could mess up the structure of a 
> program. I have enough trouble with the tabs in Makefiles.

At first yes it seems like a pain but this is because a lot of
programmers don't indent correctly anyway.  Since Python forces proper
indentation the code becomes more readable, easier to maintain and hence
contains fewer bugs in the long run.  Once a programmer throws away
their curly brace safety blanket it actually becomes more common to have
mismatched braces in other languages than to forget a tab in Python. 
Also, Python spits out much more useful debugging info than make.  Some
Python editors even allow you to turn on tab symbols in which tabs are
represented by arrows or even lined up with column markers.

--
J5