PEP8 and 4 spaces

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 6:48 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> If editors were to standardise on the convention "display a
> HORIZONTAL TAB character as visibly distinct from a sequence of
> spaces" (e.g. by shading the background a different colour, or overlying
> it with an arrow)

DeScribe Word Processor has (had? it hasn't been developed in about a
decade... but it still runs just fine) a whole lot of visual guides
for metacharacters, which can be turned on or off. Normally, we prefer
not to have a little dot to mark every 0x20 space, but you can have
'em if you want 'em; tabs get shown as diamonds; paragraph markers as
pilcrows; line breaks as a small circle; and so on. (The difference
between a paragraph and a line break isn't a normal one in most text
editors, so I'd be looking at representing U+000A newlines with a
pilcrow, probably.) Obviously you need a means of distinguishing the
end-of-line marker from an actual character, since PILCROW SIGN is a
perfectly acceptable character; but if the metacharacters are shown
in, say, a pale blue, rather than the usual black text, it'd be easy
enough.

ChrisA