[Python-ideas] gofmt for Python: standardized styling as a language feature

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/17/2015 9:54 PM, Nicholas Chammas wrote:

> I am not proposing putting |autopep8| in the standard library.

You gave that as an example and I went with it the absence of there 
being anything else concrete, even a name.  Substitute a mythical 
'autostyle' if you wish.

> I am
> proposing that an auto-styler be included with Python as a first-class
> utility. The emphasis here is on /included/ and /first-class/.

We are wary about including anything more with the CPython distribution. 
  It is already too large to be managed by the core developer group as 
well as we would like.

I disagree than not being included in 'cpython' necessarily makes 
something less than first-class, as you seemed to say in another response.

> That auto-styler may well be based somehow on |autopep8|, but that is a
> separate discussion about /implementation/. I am first checking that the
> /idea/ is sound. I can’t tell if you had any objections to that idea.

I do.  We should be careful about adding anything.  When we do, we 
should add libraries, not applications.  We should especially not 
officially endorse one of many opinion-based competitors.

Pip is the intended way to include 3rd party modules, as one chooses, as 
virtual members of the stdlib or distribution.

FWIW, CPython already comes with a minimal autostyle script, 
Tools/Scripts/reindent.py, which is used to enforce minimal requirements 
for committing new or altered stdlib .py files to the cpython hg repository.


> couldn’t |autopep8| somehow be adapted to be an included module
> that can be invoked via |python -m|

Today it is invoked with 'autopep8'.  Why would you want to have to add 
'python -m'?  For Idle, I would like to move in the other direction and 
allow Idle to be started on a command line with 'idle' rather than 
'python -m idlelib'.  (This is possible today, but only if one adds 
'.../python/lib/idlelib' to PATH, or, on windows, moves an edited 
version of idle.bat to /Scripts.)

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy