[Doc-SIG] which characters to use for docstring markup
Guido van Rossum
guido@digicool.com
Sun, 08 Apr 2001 19:24:53 -0500
> Guido:
> >> I think I'd prefer to have to write \> for > than \} for }, so I
> >> *still* prefer C<> over C{}.
>
> Is this just because you think it looks nicer? Or for some semblance
> of compatability with perldoc? Or is there some other reason?
I guess because I feel that dict displays are probably more common
than comparisons -- but I haven't made a study.
The argument could be made, though, that inside C{}, one could allow
unescaped {} to *nest*, and this would make C{{'1': 2, '2': 1}}
unambiguous. We can't do this for < and >, because they occur
unpaired much more often than } and {.
So I withdraw that objection.
(My other reason was that I thought that C{} would be harder to type
than C<>, but I can't find an objective reason for that.)
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)