[Python-Dev] Python Style Sheets ? Re: User's complaints

[Boris Borcic]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
...
> 
> This is an illustration of the dilemma of maintaining a popular
> language: Everybody hates change (me too!) but everybody also has one
> thing that's bothering them so much they absolutely want it to be
> changed. If you were to implement all those personal pet peeves, you'd
> get a language that's more different from Python than Python is from
> Fortran.
> 
> So where's the middle ground?

I feel some freedom could be reclaimed with a solution in the spirit of Turing 
equivalence. Or, to take a less grandiose comparison, web style sheets - 
separation of content and presentation.

Suppose the standard required a (possibly empty) style-defining file prefix that 
constrains the python source code in the file, and concurrently defined (mostly) 
reversible and transparent source-to-source transforms that would map any source 
code file to an equivalent source code file with an arbitrary chosen prefix. 
Then users could chose their style of Python and either transform all source 
files they install to their own style, or setup their editor to do it 
back-and-forth for them. The choice of python presentation style would then 
become a private choice.

To illustrate the idea, this already exists in very embryonic form with unicode 
encoding modelines. The current standard allows to imagine a Python editor that 
would permit to set a "local standard encoding modeline" and then present any 
source file as if it had been written while taking maximal profit from the 
chosen encoding. Which may also be simple ascii.

Cheers, BB
--
"C++ is a contradiction in terms" - Lorentz, Einstein, Poincaré