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[Steve Holden]

On 11/5/2010 4:09 PM, Seebs wrote:
> 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.
> 
The whitespace-eating nanovirus was conquered in 2005, and is not
expected to reappear.

> 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

If someone were to use a text editor which had always historically
mangled whitespace I would find myself wondering why they found it
necessary to restrict themselves to such stone-age tools.

regards
 Steve
-- 
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