[Libre-soc-dev] brace-delimited vs. indentation-based languages

[Hendrik Boom]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 02:54:14PM -0700, Jacob Lifshay wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 13:47 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 9:09 PM Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 12:55 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 8:20 PM Cole Poirier <colepoirier at gmail.com>
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > Aha! Thank you. Working on gtkwave debugging of icache.py, and
> > > > > comparing with icache.vhdl... It turns out the main state machine was
> > > > > incorrectly indented one level too far in icache_miss()
> > > >
> > > > yeah took me about 5 passes through dcache.py / dcache.vhdl to spot
> > > > things like that.  it's laborious and tedious, needs a lot of
> > > > patience.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Reasons why {} languages (like Rust) are better :)
> >
> > yyeah, they tend to get abused, with massive blocks of code that run
> > on for pages and pages, with no hope of understanding it at a high
> > level, at a glance.
> >
> > it's generally good practice to keep everything on one page (where
> > practical) by calling functions that do sub-work.
> >
> 
> Keeping functions small is important, but, even with small functions, I
> have often mis-indented code when copying it around and I have to manually
> correct that in Python, since the incorrect indentation is still a
> syntactically valid program, so the auto-formatter won't fix it. In Rust
> (or C/C++), all I have to do is type the keyboard shortcut to format the
> code and it's all properly indented and nested since the braces are in the
> right spot when I pasted the code.

I like the language to use braces *and* to insist on proper indentation.
That's the kind of redundancy that leads to catching errors automatically.

-- hendrik