matloff / matloff/R-vs.-Python-for-Data-Science

Indents in Python and maintainability

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Description

Perhaps mention something about the relative advantages and disadvantages of Python's indenting. Simple syntax may be an advantage for educational purposes but for actual production use in the real world, the more structured syntax is far clearer in intent and much easier to maintain in the long term. I have found (and probably caused) numerous errors in production Python code because of stray indents that cause unexpected behaviour. The lack of start/end tokens around code blocks, instead relying on indents for parsing syntax is an abomination in my view :-)

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Research direction

No file, test, or entry point is named in the issue. First locate the documentation section that discusses Python syntax, then review its surrounding context and add a balanced treatment of indentation's educational benefits and production maintainability concerns; done means the suggestion is addressed clearly without presenting an unsupported conclusion.

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Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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