Is PEP-8 a Code or More of a Guideline?

[Ben Finney]

Carl Banks <pavlovevidence at gmail.com> writes:

> Identifiers should just allow spaces.
>
> first element.get item(selected value)
>
> This is not a joke.

It would be a hideous pain to read though. My decades of schooling
have carved channels in my brain that recognise the space as a
*separator* for lexical elements, and any non-space separator as being
lower down the hierarchy. The parentheses just look awkward, but the
period is *definitely* joining tokens together whereas the spaces
separate them.

Thus, the example you give parses as the tokens "first",
"element.get", "item", "selected", "value".

I don't see any language with the characteristics you describe being
at all useful until the major natural language of programmers ceases
to use spaces this way.

-- 
 \     "First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing, for verbing |
  `\    weirds language. Then, they arrival for the nouns and I speech |
_o__)                        nothing, for I no verbs."  -- Peter Ellis |
Ben Finney