From python-dev, space vs. tab controversy finally settled

[Josiah Carlson]

Carl Banks wrote:

> Here's a summary of the final decision Guido made concerning how
> Python will indent code in the future, from python-dev:
> 
> Guido had been planning to deprecate tabs in favor of spaces for
> awhile, although there have been good arguments for both tabs and
> spaces.  But he was never really comfortable pulling the rug out from
> half the user base.  However, today he finally decided on a compromise
> that has all the benefits of both spaces and tabs.
> 
> His decision was predicated by the recent decision of the Unicode
> Consortium to allocate some new codes for special use in programming
> languages.  The Consortium allocated codes for (among other things):
> several sets of left and right braces, several sets of quote
> characters, a couple universal comment markers, and several
> metacharacters for use in regular expressions.
> 
> However, the code that influenced Guido was a special indent code.
> Here's how it works: at the beginning of the line, you put in one
> "indent character" for each level of indentation.  Because Python will
> support Unicode fully by 3.0, Guido decided that this new Unicode
> character will be the one and only way to indent Python code.
> 
> Now, I'm sure everyone's aware that Unicode is getting kind of full,
> and so, rather than allocating precious ununsed slots to the new
> programming characters, the Consortium decided reallocate some codes
> that had been rarely used.  These codes fall in the range 0001 through
> 001F, excepting 000A and 001A (all codes in hexadecimal).  The new
> indent character has code 0009.
> 
> So, you should start using Unicode character 0009 to indent right
> away.  Python 2.4 will deprecate all indentation not using the new
> indent character, and Python 3.0 will not support any other
> indentation.


Great april fools joke, but no such conversation has gone on in 
Python-Dev in the last 3 months.

Better luck next time.

  - Josiah