Falsehoods People Believe about PEP 8 (was: Guido sees the light: PEP 8 updated)

[Dan Sommers]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2016 11:48:11 +1000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Sun, 17 Apr 2016 09:35 am, Dan Sommers wrote:
> 
>> We (this mailing list, or maybe it was the python-ideas mailing list)
>> just had a thread about non-ASCII characters in identifiers.  One of
>> the main argument against is the confusables (A vs Α vs А).
>> Sufficient tooling, however, could render (pun intended) that
>> argument moot.  Not too long ago, one of the main arguments against
>> was that not everyone's tools could even render Α or А.
> 
> Technically speaking, they still might not. My editor can render both
> Cyrillic and Greek characters, but does a terrible job at Chinese and
> Korean because I don't have the font support. So all I see is a series
> of "missing character" boxes. There may be folks who don't have
> installed fonts that support Cyrillic or Greek.

I think we're agreeing.  Not everyone's tools render the same source
code the same way, which means that at least some part of readability
depends on the tools people use.

People who use screen readers rather than visual displays probably
wonder why the rest of us can't tell our "l"s from our "1"s and our "O"s
from our "0"s.

If PEP8 is about readability, then it should dispell the myth that
everyone perceives source code the same way through the same tools.