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

[Guido van Rossum]

You must be misunderstanding. The root problem is that people
(rightly) complain that the language changes too much. And you want to
"fix" this by adding a deep and fundamental change to the language?
What planet are you from? It reminds me of Jini, which was presented
as a new standard to address the problem of too many conflicting
standard. Get it? :-)

--Guido

On 7/14/06, Boris Borcic <bborcic at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)