Tabs/spaces for indentation (was Re: re.search when used within an if/else fails)

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Perhaps it would be nice if Python honoured a directive setting indent
> style to spaces or indents, as it honours source code encoding lines:
>
> # -*- indent: <mode> -*-
>
> Where <mode> could be one of:
>
> space[s]        Only accept spaces in indentation
> tab[s]          Only accept tabs in indentation
> mixed           Accept "mixed" tabs and spaces, but only if consistent
>
> with mixed the default for backward compatibility.

I don't know that it needs to be a declaration like that; character
encodings are critical to parsing the file, but
newline-followed-by-tab and newline-followed-by-space are unambiguous.
But it would be of value to have something like that, as editors could
then be configured to respect it - set the editor to turn tab-key into
N spaces but only if "indent tab" is not set, for instance. The
question is, is it worth it? The main value would be when you're
editing someone else's code.

ChrisA