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My point was not that this was absolutely hard, but rather that's way too hard for the totally mundane thing I was trying to accomplish---namely getting public
by john_horton 15y ago
My point was not that this was absolutely hard, but rather that's way too hard for the totally mundane thing I was trying to accomplish---namely getting public data from a US-funded statistical agency into a form suitable for further statistical analysis (which is the whole reason they make this data public).
Also, I don't see how it's ironic that I used Python---it seems irrelevant. Whitespace in Python has a well-defined, commonly understood purpose; using tabs or spaces to indicate hierarchal data relationships is not at all standard, presumably because it creates messy dependencies across rows of data.
- lurker19 15y ago"Messy dependencies across rows" is exactly how Python whitespace works. That data file exactly Pythonic indentation in the main content section.
- john_horton 15y agoThe reason indentation to imply structure doesn't make sense for datasets is that in data analysis you are constantly subsetting and sorting data at the row level---something you generally don't do to the lines of a compter program.