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In computer programming, indentation style is a convention, a.k.a. style, governing the indentation of blocks of source code.An indentation style generally involves consistent width of whitespace (indentation size) before each line of a block, so that the lines of code appear to be related, and dictates whether to use space or tab characters for the indentation whitespace.
For example, Python's PEP 8 is a widely recognized style guide that outlines best practices for writing Python code. In contrast, languages like C or Java may have industry standards that are either formally documented or adhered to by convention.
Reducing the cost of software maintenance is the most often cited reason for following coding conventions. In the introductory section on code conventions for the Java programming language, Sun Microsystems offers the following reasoning: [2]
Syntax highlighting and indent style are often used to aid programmers in recognizing elements of source code. This Python code uses color-coded highlighting. In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that define the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in ...
In practice, the available CLASS words would be a list of less than two dozen terms. CLASS words, typically positioned on the right (suffix), served much the same purpose as Hungarian notation prefixes. The purpose of CLASS words, in addition to consistency, was to specify to the programmer the data type of a particular data field. Prior to the ...
Python borrows this feature from its predecessor ABC: instead of punctuation or keywords, it uses indentation to indicate the run of a block. In so-called "free-format" languages—that use the block structure derived from ALGOL—blocks of code are set off with braces ({ }) or keywords.
Formally this means that it satisfies the usual lexical syntax (syntax of words) of identifiers – for example, being a sequence of letters – but cannot be used where identifiers are used. For example, the word if is commonly a reserved word, while x generally is not, so x = 1 is a valid assignment, but if = 1 is not.
The detailed semantics of "the" ternary operator as well as its syntax differs significantly from language to language. A top level distinction from one language to another is whether the expressions permit side effects (as in most procedural languages) and whether the language provides short-circuit evaluation semantics, whereby only the selected expression is evaluated (most standard ...