Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's as bad as using regular expressions: now you have TWO problems. Why do you seem to think you've cleverly solved the problem, when you've just moved the problem somewhere else just as bad, by blithely messing with the standard formatting conventions universally used by most human written languages and programming languages in the world? Programming languages borrow commas from human written languages, and no hu…
> I would fire and forget any developer who tried to pull that stunt. A tad bit harsh there? it is a trade off. clarity and ease during design time versus slightly uglier but still consistent code as a work around. miniscule energy overhead
>tezza 4 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]
>as mentioned elsewhere, i personally introduce a pad element to get fire and forget consistency
Adding an extra pad entry is a cure much worse than the disease, and I'd expect it should be objectively obvious to anyone that you're introducing more complexity and noise than you're removing, so it's not just a matter of "style" when you're pointlessly increasing the amount of work, memory, and network traffic per row. But sadly some people are just blind to or careless about that kind of complexity and waste.
You might at least have the courtesy of writing a comment explaining "Ignore this extra unused pad argument because I'm just adding it to make the following commas line up." But that would make it even more painfully obvious that your solution was much worse than the problem you're trying to solve. You seem to have forgotten that other people have to read your code. Maybe just don't leave dumpster fires burning in your code that you want to forget in the first place.
As Guido so wisely puts it: "the complexity introduced by a solution to a design problem must be somehow proportional to the problem's importance".