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> The detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented Not to my knowledge, and I have a great interest in UIs and usability, so a link would be ver

> The detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented Not to my knowledge, and I have a great interest in UIs and usability, so a link would be very interesting. It would also help resolve a lot of whitespace vs. brackets debates if you can find it, thanks. > But there are more uncharitable interpretations That was nasty.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
Lower case prose with plenty of whitespace and little punctuation is the easiest to read, and well known from the days of typesetting books and periodicals. Python is the closest to that of major langs. Taken to the other extreme you get perl to APL. Or perhaps programming with east-asian symbols. You're unlikely to find many peer-reviewed studies on this, the way you won't find many on proving other things learned centuries past.
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  "detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented". Your words. So please produce.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    I found these with google: - http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf (about prose but mentions bullet points with space) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARITIVE_ANALYSIS_OF_THE_C_JAVA_AND_PYTHON_LANGUAGES https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARI... - https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/298564/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2985... - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 A quicker method however: Do you find regular expressions more readable than string methods? If so, you're highly unique. If not, you already agree.
    - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
      Really? I picked these two at random: "A COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS ..." They can't even spell it. "Project from course CS430 Principles of Programming Languages" - It's a school project. Whitespace is mentioned exactly twice. It has completely unverified asssertions such as "Easy-to-read: Python code is much more clearly defined and visible to the eyes". The rest of that list are pretty dumb too. That paper's worth nothing. It's literally schoolwork. and one I looked at is https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ Whitespace is used there as a feature of graphics layout mainly (though text too, as margins, space between lines etc). From it “Whitespace,” or “negative space” is the space between elements in a composition Article's about using space around things. If this is about defending punctuation then it's not, and if it's about whitespace in the sense of left-indenting python, it's not either. As for the question about regexps, they aren't punctuation that punctuates anything else, they're a mini, dense string language. They reveal nothing about python spaces vs braces, and nothing about punctuation in an informal or formal language. To answer your question about regexps, which is clearer depends on what's required. A common emacs regex is to remove left-spaces from data: ^[ \t]+ -> (empty string here) To swap 2 fields separated by a space (assuming the 2 fields don't contain spaces, common in data scrubbing): \(.\) \(.\) -> \2 \1 In these cases regexps are cleaner than methods, but that I find it so neither supports nor denies agreement with you. This is silly. Good night.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Lower case prose with plenty of whitespace and little punctuation is the easiest to read, and well known from the days of typesetting books and periodicals. Python is the closest to that of major langs. Taken to the other extreme you get perl to APL. Or perhaps programming with east-asian symbols. You're unlikely to find many peer-reviewed studies on this, the way you won't find many on proving other things learned centuries past.

throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
"detriment to readability of punctuation chars is documented". Your words. So please produce.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  I found these with google: - http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf http://impact-information.com/impactinfo/readability02.pdf (about prose but mentions bullet points with space) - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARITIVE_ANALYSIS_OF_THE_C_JAVA_AND_PYTHON_LANGUAGES https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320407173_A_COMPARI... - https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/298564/ https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2985... - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8091188 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2019.00047 A quicker method however: Do you find regular expressions more readable than string methods? If so, you're highly unique. If not, you already agree.
  - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
    Really? I picked these two at random: "A COMPARITIVE ANALYSIS ..." They can't even spell it. "Project from course CS430 Principles of Programming Languages" - It's a school project. Whitespace is mentioned exactly twice. It has completely unverified asssertions such as "Easy-to-read: Python code is much more clearly defined and visible to the eyes". The rest of that list are pretty dumb too. That paper's worth nothing. It's literally schoolwork. and one I looked at is https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ https://alistapart.com/article/whitespace/ Whitespace is used there as a feature of graphics layout mainly (though text too, as margins, space between lines etc). From it “Whitespace,” or “negative space” is the space between elements in a composition Article's about using space around things. If this is about defending punctuation then it's not, and if it's about whitespace in the sense of left-indenting python, it's not either. As for the question about regexps, they aren't punctuation that punctuates anything else, they're a mini, dense string language. They reveal nothing about python spaces vs braces, and nothing about punctuation in an informal or formal language. To answer your question about regexps, which is clearer depends on what's required. A common emacs regex is to remove left-spaces from data: ^[ \t]+ -> (empty string here) To swap 2 fields separated by a space (assuming the 2 fields don't contain spaces, common in data scrubbing): \(.\) \(.\) -> \2 \1 In these cases regexps are cleaner than methods, but that I find it so neither supports nor denies agreement with you. This is silly. Good night.