[Python-ideas] Ignorable whitespaces in the re.VERBOSE mode

[Serhiy Storchaka]

20.11.17 10:13, Stephen J. Turnbull пише:
> Otherwise I'm with Paul, who writes:
> 
>   > My instinct is not to worry about it unless someone has actually hit
>   > the issue in practice and raised a bug.
> 
> After the tabs vs. spaces fiasco, I lean steeply to the right for code
> -- including embedded languages like regexes.  *We* say what is
> allowed there, and *you* can find an editor that does it our way.

I agree. But if there is a special part of the Unicode standard for 
Pattern White Spaces which includes non-ASCII characters, perhaps there 
is a need in them. I asked for the case if Python developers with very 
different cultures have need in additional whitespaces in regular 
expressions, but I don't know. Seems nobody has claimed their need.

In particularly I don't know how helpful would be supporting 
right-to-left and left-to-right marks in verbose regular expressions (or 
even in Python code), or this will just add confusion? Unicode 
identifiers already can be misused for confusion due to homoglyphs. The 
problem is not that correctly looking program can be rejected by the 
compiler, but that the program can work differently from expected 
because it uses different names that look the same.