[Python-Dev] Python Style Sheets ? Re: User's complaints

[Boris Borcic]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> You must be misunderstanding.

I don't think so. You appeared to say that the language changes too much because 
everyone wants different changes - that accumulate. I suggested a mechanism 
allowing people to see only the changes they want - or none at all - might be 
devised.

Regards, BB

> The root problem is that people
> (rightly) complain that the language changes too much. And you want to
> "fix" this by adding a deep and fundamental change to the language?
> What planet are you from? It reminds me of Jini, which was presented
> as a new standard to address the problem of too many conflicting
> standard. Get it? :-)
> 
> --Guido
> 
> On 7/14/06, Boris Borcic <bborcic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> ...
>>> This is an illustration of the dilemma of maintaining a popular
>>> language: Everybody hates change (me too!) but everybody also has one
>>> thing that's bothering them so much they absolutely want it to be
>>> changed. If you were to implement all those personal pet peeves, you'd
>>> get a language that's more different from Python than Python is from
>>> Fortran.
>>>
>>> So where's the middle ground?
>> I feel some freedom could be reclaimed with a solution in the spirit of Turing
>> equivalence. Or, to take a less grandiose comparison, web style sheets -
>> separation of content and presentation.
>>
>> Suppose the standard required a (possibly empty) style-defining file prefix that
>> constrains the python source code in the file, and concurrently defined (mostly)
>> reversible and transparent source-to-source transforms that would map any source
>> code file to an equivalent source code file with an arbitrary chosen prefix.
>> Then users could chose their style of Python and either transform all source
>> files they install to their own style, or setup their editor to do it
>> back-and-forth for them. The choice of python presentation style would then
>> become a private choice.
>>
>> To illustrate the idea, this already exists in very embryonic form with unicode
>> encoding modelines. The current standard allows to imagine a Python editor that
>> would permit to set a "local standard encoding modeline" and then present any
>> source file as if it had been written while taking maximal profit from the
>> chosen encoding. Which may also be simple ascii.
>>
>> Cheers, BB
>> --
>> "C++ is a contradiction in terms" - Lorentz, Einstein, Poincaré
>>
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> 
>