I work in a place where people don't use spaces and don't use empty lines to sep...

cageface · on March 19, 2012

It's Python code and I find it uglier than some fairly large C++ project I used to work on.

I've always argued that if your team can't bother to even indent code properly than you have much bigger problems than any language formatting rules can solve.

scott_w · on March 19, 2012

One time we worked on some code, and one of the developers had the same habit: "It works, so why do I need to format it?"

We decided to make our build system run PEP over the code, resulting in a failure if PEP didn't pass.

It annoyed the hell out of him, but we quickly got the formatting up to a better standard.

Luyt · on March 19, 2012

PEP8? http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

scott_w · on March 20, 2012

My apologies, yes. Don't know why I missed the 8 off there.

FreakLegion · on March 19, 2012

I completely support enforced style -- it's part of what I love about Python and F#'s light mode -- but it has to be the right style.

I strongly believe that code should look like a screenplay, not a novel. More white space, in other words, is rarely a bad thing. Inline braces decrease white space and make unfamiliar code harder to scan, so to me they're Not Good.

Also wow, I didn't know it was even possible to write Python without spaces. Are we talking no spaces in arguments, like

    def func(arg1,arg2):
        print "Indented"
        return

or full-on no spaces?

    def func(arg1,arg2):
    print "Not indented"
    return

I thought the latter was prohibited.

nakkiel · on March 20, 2012

Sorry, we are talking about that:

    def func(arg1,arg2):
        i=other_stuff(1,2,3,4,56,43,234+4*3)
        return i