The point that OP is trying to make is that a fixed standard that is distinguishable from the even-spacing Tab-length convention in code and text editors will establish a level of trust between the end developer and upstream developers or co-developers who may not have the same development environment. For example, the first Python library I ever tried to use was poorly maintained and had spaces on one line with tabs on the next, and the author mixed naming conventions and syntax from Python 2 and 3 in his code. That type of experience doesn’t exactly instill trust in the coding language’s standards, when a noob tries to use a library they found and ends up having to debug weird errors with weirder error messages on the first project they do.
Flexibility is great until the learning curve comes into play. That said, there is an easy fix for tab misuse: in Visual Studio Code, you can replace all Tabs with Spaces by highlighting the entire code block, hitting Tab once and Shift-Tab after. Peace Ryan On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 4:51 PM Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > On 10/5/2018 4:48 PM, ts9...@gmail.com wrote: > > I am new to Python programming but have significant SQL and C > experience. My simple question is,"Why not standardize Python indentations > to 3 spaces instead of 4 in order to avoid potential programming errors > associated with using "TAB" instead of 4 spaces?" > > IDLE (and other modern editors and IDEs) turns a typed TAB into a > user-settable n spaces, where n defaults to 4 (minimum 2, maximum 16). > > -- > Terry Jan Reedy > > -- > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- Ryan Johnson -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
