From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2009-05-25T07:09:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Pythonic indentation (or: beating a dead horse)


From: "James Britt" <james.britt@gmail.com>
> 
> My concern is that you can mistakenly add 4 spaces instead of two, or 
> vice versa, and get valid code (i.e. the parser does not see anything 
> technically wrong) yet not have the code you really wanted.

That happened to us a couple times developing in
Python.  We were using spaces only (no tabs) ...
but somehow some tab characters did occasionally
sneak into a source file.  (Possibly by copy/paste
of code from a different editor--I was never sure
how it happened.)

So the indentation looked fine to us in the editor
(seeing two-column tabs), but was interpreted
differently by Python (eight-column tabs), resulting
in some baffling "it can't possibly be doing that!"
moments while debugging.

These days, I have my editor set to highlight tab
characters visually... :)


Regards,

Bill