[Python-3000] PEP 3131 accepted (original) (raw)

Neil Toronto ntoronto at cs.byu.edu
Wed May 23 21:48:10 CEST 2007

Josiah Carlson wrote:

Thank you for hitting home that unless people use Emacs, their tools arent sufficient for Python development. I still don't believe that my concerns have been addressed. And I certainly don't believe that those Ka-Ping brought up (which are better than mine) have been addressed. But hey, my tools aren't Emacs, so obviusly my concerns regarding using my tools to edit Python in the future don't matter. Thank you for the vote of confidence.

Though I don't develop an editor in my spare time, I had a similar reaction to the "Emacs does Unicode this way, which is correct" solutions. My favorite editor is going to have to get awfully smart.

It reminds me of some friction I experienced when trying out Lisp. It's fairly painful to program in Lisp without an editor that does paren-matching and automatic indentation. I tried Emacs, and I didn't like it, which is a shame because it's the One True Editor for programming in Lisp. I basically dropped Lisp over this issue.

In Lisp's case, the editor has to be smart because Lisp syntax is insufficient on its own to express program semantics to a human. (Every programming language has this problem to some extent, Lisp more than most because of all the parenthesis and general lack of visual cues, and Python much less than most because of smart use of operators and syntactically significant whitespace.) This is a user interface problem for a language, so it rubs me the wrong way to have to have it solved by an editor.

Likewise, Unicode identifiers present numerous (detailed elsewhere) user interface problems. My general feeling is that language issues shouldn't be solved by editors. You should be able to comfortably change the semantics of a program with just about any text editor. Otherwise, we have a situation where some editors are blessed for use with the language and most are not, and if a would-be programmer's favorite isn't on the list, he leaves.

Neil

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