Why Python style guide (PEP-8) says 4 space indents instead of 8 space??? 8 space indents ever ok??

[Ian Bicking]

On Wednesday, October 22, 2003, at 05:31 PM, Christian Seberino wrote:
> Linux kernel style guide, Guido's C style guide and (I believe) old
> K&R style recommends 8 SPACES for indent.
>
> I finally got convinced of wisdom of 8 space indentation.
>
> Guido also likes 8 space indentation FOR C CODE.
>
> Why style guide (PEP-8) for Python says 4 space indents???
>
> Is breaking rule to use 8 space indents everywhere
> a REALLY bad idea??
>
> I REALLY WANT TO DO MY OPEN SOURCE PYTHON PROJECT
> WITH 8 SPACE IDENTS!!!!

You can, it's just kind of annoying.  Typically I work with two indents 
at a minimum, because most (of my) code is in a method of a class.  
With 8 spaces that's 20% of the space gone.  And when using long names, 
that means I can end up with word wrapping problems pretty quickly.  
Even if I do as little nesting as possible, consider this (quite 
reasonable) level of nesting:

class Whatever:
         def method(self, someArg, someOtherArg):
                 for smallerPiece in someArg:
                         if smallerPiece.isValid():
                                 newSmallerPiece = 
someOtherArg.doSomethingWith(smallerPiece)

I hope that turns out okay, since my mail client wrapped it (but then 
that was the point ;).  I would not consider this level of nesting to 
be bad programming, or programming that is in need of refactoring.  I 
didn't even do tuple unpacking in that assignment...

Maybe I would be more concerned with too much nesting if I was 
programming in C.  C is more apt to have subtle and dangerous problems, 
so you want to avoid even localized complexity.  You do a lot more 
things in place in C, while Python uses more return values.  Because of 
exceptions you don't have to use the small chunks of code that C 
requires for error detection.

But that's just my own opinion, you can do what you want (just don't 
use tabs ;).

--
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org