[Python-Dev] Python Style Sheets ? Re: User's complaints (original) (raw)

Boris Borcic bborcic at gmail.com
Mon Jul 17 14:51:17 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

You must be misunderstanding.

I don't think so. You appeared to say that the language changes too much because everyone wants different changes - that accumulate. I suggested a mechanism allowing people to see only the changes they want - or none at all - might be devised.

Regards, BB

The root problem is that people (rightly) complain that the language changes too much. And you want to "fix" this by adding a deep and fundamental change to the language? What planet are you from? It reminds me of Jini, which was presented as a new standard to address the problem of too many conflicting standard. Get it? :-)

--Guido On 7/14/06, Boris Borcic <bborcic at gmail.com> wrote: Guido van Rossum wrote: ...

This is an illustration of the dilemma of maintaining a popular language: Everybody hates change (me too!) but everybody also has one thing that's bothering them so much they absolutely want it to be changed. If you were to implement all those personal pet peeves, you'd get a language that's more different from Python than Python is from Fortran.

So where's the middle ground? I feel some freedom could be reclaimed with a solution in the spirit of Turing equivalence. Or, to take a less grandiose comparison, web style sheets - separation of content and presentation. Suppose the standard required a (possibly empty) style-defining file prefix that constrains the python source code in the file, and concurrently defined (mostly) reversible and transparent source-to-source transforms that would map any source code file to an equivalent source code file with an arbitrary chosen prefix. Then users could chose their style of Python and either transform all source files they install to their own style, or setup their editor to do it back-and-forth for them. The choice of python presentation style would then become a private choice. To illustrate the idea, this already exists in very embryonic form with unicode encoding modelines. The current standard allows to imagine a Python editor that would permit to set a "local standard encoding modeline" and then present any source file as if it had been written while taking maximal profit from the chosen encoding. Which may also be simple ascii. Cheers, BB -- "C++ is a contradiction in terms" - Lorentz, Einstein, Poincaré

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