[sugar] Python coding conventions

[Ian Bicking]

Dan Williams wrote:
> There's always modelines, and as long as everyone agrees that a tab is
> the same width (enforced with modelines and whatnot), the code is always
> readable anyway.  It's completely the same problem.  If you choose
> spaces, everyone has to agree on (a) using spaces in the first place,
> and (b) agree on an indent width, either 4 or 8 spaces.  If you choose
> tabs, everyone has to agree on (a) using tabs in the first place, and
> (b) agree on a tab width, either 4 or 8 "spaces".  It's exactly the same
> choice either way, and making somebody else use spaces is exactly the
> same thing as making somebody use tabs.  Obviously the world would be a
> better place if everyone had exactly the same opinions... :)

FWIW my tab stops are at 8, and the code is misindented in places as a 
result (usually function declarations).  And my editor (Emacs) doesn't 
skip leading spaces or treat them as blocks, but it's never bothered me 
(it does otherwise handle indentation well).  I guess I use 
Ctrl-Left/Right for much of my navigation anyway.

The issue I see is that tabs and spaces look identical, and so are 
easily confused as a reader.  There's other problems, like tabs getting 
lost of expanded.  Entering a tab in a browser textarea can be hard. 
When I paste code into Thunderbird it expands tabs to spaces.  Generally 
tabs seem like they should be nice -- everyone uses exactly one tab per 
indentation level, you can set the width however you want, etc -- but in 
practice there seem to be more problems than advantages.

Generally speaking visually identical but semantically different 
characters seem really bad -- especially for beginner programmers (for 
whom this code should be accessible) -- and certainly the space 
character isn't going away...

-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org