Tabbing/Spaces

[Quinn Dunkan]

On Sat, 20 Jan 2001 12:47:54 +0100, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
>"Quinn Dunkan" <quinn at groat.ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote in message
>news:slrn96ipbi.oul.quinn at groat.ugcs.caltech.edu...
>> On 19 Jan 2001 16:17:13 -0800, Johann Hibschman
><johann at physics.berkeley.edu>
>> wrote:
>> >Shrug.  Whatever suits you best, I guess.  I just hate getting all-tab
>> >code, since then I have to re-indent it for it to be readable.
>> >All-space code, on the other hand, always looks fine.
>>
>> Unless you use proportional fonts.
>
>The syntactically significant whitespace in Python is that from
>the left margin and the first non-white character of each line.
>_In this specific context_, use of proportional fonts is not an
>issue: 'all-space code ... looks fine' regardless of that.

I disagree---the spaces are way too narrow, and it makes it quite hard to
figure out what lines up with what, or worse, figure out how many spaces to
hit to get into the right block.  It doesn't look *awful*, but it sure doesn't
look "fine"... at least not to my (low-res) eyes.

And of course, people don't just format relative to the left margin, they also
also try to line up other things (although it's easy to go overboard on that).