On 11/5/2010 4:09 PM, Seebs wrote: > On 2010-11-05, Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote: >> On 2010-11-05, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote: >>> On 2010-11-05, Emile van Sebille <em...@fenx.com> wrote: >>>> So, which of your tools are you married to that are causing your issues? > >>> Python. > >> I think you should quit using Python and choose a language that works >> with whatever tools are causing all your white-space corruption >> problems. > > Ahh, but that's the thing. I'm married to it -- there's existing projects > I want to work on which are in Python. > > Anyway, it was a sort of frivolous answer, but it's ha-ha-only-serious; > after all, there were no serious issues with any of these tools before. > > There's a saying a friend of mine has; "a lack of communication is never > exclusively one party's fault." This applies, in many cases, to things > like "issues" that occur when two programs clash in some aspect of their > designs. In some cases, there might be a real and unambiguous standard > to be violated. In others, though, you can have a problem which arises > from a clash in expectations between two programs, either of which is fine > on its own. > > There is a clash between Python and the whole category of things which > sometimes lose whitespace. Because that category is reasonably large, > and known to be large, and unlikely to vanish, many language designers > choose to build their languages to be robust in the face of minor changes > in whitespace. Python chose not to, and that is a source of conflicts. > The whitespace-eating nanovirus was conquered in 2005, and is not expected to reappear.
> Were someone to invent a *new* text editor, which mangled whitespace, I > would accuse it of being gratuitously incompatible with Python; I tend > to regard compatibility, once you get past the standards, as a matter > of temporal precedence. > > -s If someone were to use a text editor which had always historically mangled whitespace I would find myself wondering why they found it necessary to restrict themselves to such stone-age tools. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 PyCon 2011 Atlanta March 9-17 http://us.pycon.org/ See Python Video! http://python.mirocommunity.org/ Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
