On 2010-11-06, Steve Holden <st...@holdenweb.com> wrote: > 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.
I have yet to find an editor that allows me to, well, *edit*, more comfortably than vi. As to what it does with whitespace... What it does is exactly what is most desireable in every other kind of file I edit. I wouldn't normally refer to it as "mangling" in the pejorative sense; it mostly leaves spaces alone, but when preserving indentation from one line to the next, uses tabs. That, it turns out, is useful and desireable in nearly all programming languages, and in particular, in all the other programming languages I use. I don't think it's fair to accuse tools of being "stone age" on the grounds that they do something which most users want most of the time by default. The "no tabs, only spaces" thing is an interesting idiosyncrasy of a particular community, which places a high value on telling people to change everything about their computing environment so they can appreciate how robust Python is when you make a point of blaming any and all quirks or nuisances on tools. We might as well insist that everyone use editors which automatically add the braces to C code (such exist) when they complain about the "effort" of typing matching braces. Surely, if you have to type braces by hand, the problem isn't with C, but with your stone age editor? Oh, wait. That kind of smug dismissiveness is considered rude unless it's done in *favor* of Python. -s -- Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.net http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated! I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
