PEP 8 and extraneous whitespace

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2011-07-22, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 6:59 AM, Neil Cerutti <neilc at norwich.edu> wrote:
>> Under the assumption that leading white space is important for
>> code formatting, but that all alignment after that is
>> unimportant.
>
> ...unless you're trying to adhere to a line length limit.  "80
> characters" is a lot easier to do in a fixed-width font, and
> "10 inches" or "400 pixels" or however you want to do it in a
> proportional font effectively limits you to using that specific
> font, at that specific size.

You can fit much more code per unit of horizontal space with a
proportionally spaced font. As a result, that issue, while valid,
is significantly reduced.

Of some concern are consecutive underscores. Unless your font is
designed specifically for programming, it can be hard to
distinguish from a single underscore. You generally need to use a
programming-specialized font even when using fixed width, though,
so I'm not sure this issue is unique.

-- 
Neil Cerutti