Idea for alternative use for @

[Paul McGuire]

I was just reading over Mark Lutz's excellent article on OnLamp, titled
"When Pythons Attack -
Common Mistakes of Python Programmers"
(http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2004/02/05/learn_python.html).  One of
the common pitfalls he cites is the mixing of spaces and tabs, and how this
is not always reliable since tabs can be handled differently in different
platforms and editors.

I thought it might be useful to include some sort of compiler directive like
a C++ pragma to represent this kind of compile-time meta information.  And
it struck me that '@' would be an excellent marker for such a statement,
something like:
@tabsize 8

It clearly marks the statement as some sort of non-Python information.  It
could be used for any number of compiler information items, such as module
include paths, macro definitions, debug levels, command switches, version
limitations (@min_version 2.3.4).

I guess this still does not address the conflict with tools such as Leo that
already use '@' for internal code markup purposes, tho.  I know '$' is also
available, but '@' just looks better to me for this purpose.

-- Paul

Vote for J2.  Keep Python Beautiful.