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

[Guido van Rossum]

> Nobody's attacking Zope's ST; at least, *I'm* not. It works for Zope; long
> live Zope & ST! I apologize for any perceived attack.

I think I know why Ken's a little apprehensive.  I've repeatedly and
loudly complained about ST on internal lists; I've repeated most of my
arguments why it is broken here.  While they may not hold against
ST-like systems, the ST implementation currently in use for ZWiki
really does leave a lot to be desired, IMO, and I am sorry for the
poor Zope users who have to use it.

> My goal is simple: I want to write easily extractable docstrings in my
> Python programs, and quick & dirty web pages and docs in general,
> convertable to something useful. Because of its warts, ST (Classic or Next
> Generation) hasn't been accepted for this purpose by myself or the Python
> community.
> 
> Specifically, I was referring to the conflicting use of ' -- ' in ST for
> definition/descriptive lists versus its common use in texts as em-dashes.
> Somebody mentioned forcing people to use it for DL's only. If it's in common
> use for one thing, I can't see using it for another. I think that
> single-quotes for literals is another conflict, a wart that, if removed, may
> bring us one step closer to my stated goal. Adding an escape mechanism is a
> must, but you may see it as adding a wart. One man's wart is another man's
> beauty mark.

This may be moving in the right direction: identify specific warts in
ST and fix them, without losing the general vision.  (But
compatibility with existing implementations is *not* a requirement, as
it would force us to keep too many bad design decisions.)

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