[Pythonmac-SIG] Selecting in BBEdit & Python Indenting style (spaces)

[Jack Jansen]

On 29-nov-2005, at 18:33, Louis Pecora wrote:

> What the heck were they (Guido?) thinking when they used 4 spaces  
> as the one true mode of indentation for Python?

Initially Python was unix-only, and there (at that time) a tab was 8  
spaces and that is that, no problem with mixing tab/spaces. Then the  
Mac (and later dos/windows) joined the scene, which had 4-space tabs.  
Then it was deemed mixing tab/space was bad (because code got ugly or  
even didn't work when ported between 4- and 8-space tabs. Because at  
that time most editors (both on Unix and Windows) still did not have  
the feature to set how many spaces a tabstop was it was decided to go  
with spaces for indenting: going with tabs would have meant unix- 
heads would be stuck with unusable 8-space indents.
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma  
Goldman