[Doc-SIG] using the same delimiter on the left and right..
Guido van Rossum
guido@digicool.com
Fri, 30 Mar 2001 10:27:10 -0500
> 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/)