[Doc-SIG] using the same delimiter on the left and right..

[Guido van Rossum]

> Guido van Rossum writes:
> > In many fonts, backtick is hard to distinguish from apostrophe!
> 
> In many fonts, '1' (one) is hard to distinguish from 'l' (el), or 'O'
> (upcase oh) from '0' (zero). Programmers (& other docstring writers) ought
> to choose a programmer-friendly font. ;->

I know there's a smiley, but this still reminds me of an attitude that
I have occasionally seen in this discussion.  On the one hand, I hear
a lot of "we can't require people to change their habits <in this
particular way> because we know they don't want to change their
habits".  On the other hand, a lot of objections are countered with
"then just change your habits <in this other way> to work around <your
particular objection>".

This seems to come from a confusion between two similar, but
different goals:

- It should be easy to read without any knowledge of the markup
  language

- It should be possible to author without knowing the whole markup
  language and without changing your habits

I can agree with the first one, but I think the second will continue
to get us into trouble.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)