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[Seebs]

On 2010-11-05, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 2010-11-05, Seebs <usenet-nospam at seebs.net> wrote:
>> On 2010-11-05, Emile van Sebille <emile at fenx.com> wrote:
>>> So, which of your tools are you married to that are causing your issues?

>> Python.

> I think you should quit using Python and choose a language that works
> with whatever tools are causing all your white-space corruption
> problems.

Ahh, but that's the thing.  I'm married to it -- there's existing projects
I want to work on which are in Python.

Anyway, it was a sort of frivolous answer, but it's ha-ha-only-serious;
after all, there were no serious issues with any of these tools before.

There's a saying a friend of mine has; "a lack of communication is never
exclusively one party's fault."  This applies, in many cases, to things
like "issues" that occur when two programs clash in some aspect of their
designs.  In some cases, there might be a real and unambiguous standard
to be violated.  In others, though, you can have a problem which arises
from a clash in expectations between two programs, either of which is fine
on its own.

There is a clash between Python and the whole category of things which
sometimes lose whitespace.  Because that category is reasonably large,
and known to be large, and unlikely to vanish, many language designers
choose to build their languages to be robust in the face of minor changes
in whitespace.  Python chose not to, and that is a source of conflicts.

Were someone to invent a *new* text editor, which mangled whitespace, I
would accuse it of being gratuitously incompatible with Python; I tend
to regard compatibility, once you get past the standards, as a matter
of temporal precedence.

-s
-- 
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed.  Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam at seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
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I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions.