this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
61 points (73.6% liked)
Programming
17326 readers
217 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
False dichotomy. Optional braces are bad practice because they mislead the programmer that is adding an additional clause to the block.
This misleading behavior wouldn't happen in Python, as it would either be invalid syntax, or it would be part of the block.
Indentation problems are pretty obvious to the reader. Even more than missing or unbalanced braces.
They may be obvious to the reader but they may be impossible to see if tabs and spaces are mixed together.
Closing tokens are always clearer.
yes, from my other comment
but that's easily fixed with an editor setting - on the other hand, unbalancing braces (and not realizing it) is too easy all the time.
That misleading behavior does happen in Python. The next programmer that comes along can’t tell if the original programmer fucked it up and didn’t unindent to put a statement outside of the block or if they meant to put it inside the block. I’ve debugged this one too many times and it takes hours each time because it’s impossible to see the bug at all!!
The misleading behavior is about what you expect to execute in the source code you're looking at vs what's actually executed.
What you describe is a logic ambiguity that can happen in any program / language.
I don’t agree. It’s a direct result of whitespace, which does not happen if you don’t use whitespace. For example it can happen in Java and kotlin, but only if you use if statements without braces, which you pretty much never see. If you do see it you know to look out for the exact issue I described. That’s not possible in Python, since there is no alternative.