On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 1:17 PM Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas <python-ideas@python.org> wrote:
(By the way, the reason I used -f rather than —fix is that I can’t figure out how to get the iPhone Mail.app to not replace double hyphens with an em-dash, or even how to fix it when it does. All of the other fancifier stuff can be worked around pretty easily, but apparently not that one…)

Totally OT -- but just the other day, I was using a Google Sheets, and it kept converting "4, 5, 6" or "4-5-6"  into a date. I could NOT figure out how to turn it off -- infuriating!

Back OT: The fact that there are many ways that our text may get mangled in other systems does not mean Python should tolerate ambiguity.

Having a "tabnanny-like" function / module in the stdlib would be nice, though I'd think a stand alone module in PyPi would be almost as good, and a good way to see if it gains traction.

BTW -- there are a whole lot of Syntax Errors that a semi smart algorithm could provide meaningful suggestions about about. I'm pretty sure that's come up before on this list, but maybe  "helpful" mode you could run Python in that would do that for all Syntax errors that it could. We could even have a way for folks to extend it with additional checks.

Kind of like how git makes suggestions if you type something almost like a command.

-CHB

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Christopher Barker, PhD

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