[Idle-dev] The '>>> ' prompt is bad

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/20/2012 7:51 PM, Alan Gauld wrote:

> But that is the current situation in IDLE? With no secondary prompt the
> first indented line often starts to the left of the unindented line above.

No, because the tab indent is somehow bigger than PS1 in any font I have 
tried. But perhaps you meant that an unindented subheader line starts to 
the left.
 >>> if a:
         print('if')
else:
         print('else')

> Hmm, you've lost me there. What difference does Unicode make to the
> display? Surely Unicode only affects how many bits are used to store the
> characters not how they are displayed?

As I meant to say and Guido did, it affects whether monospace is 
practical. That is why there are no monospace unicode fonts that I know 
of. There is something else that was at the back of my mind. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms
There are asian ascii chars that are *defined* as half the width of 
'standard' asian chars.

> Sure, Python can work with non mono-spaced fonts - always has - but they
> can mess up indentation so that off-by-one-space errors are hard to
> spot. (Not so big an issue if you always use tabs for indents I
> guess...but that's another debate! :-)

Idle is designed so you can indent with tab and dedent with (one) delete 
even while converting tabs to the number of spaces you specify.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy