In PEP 9 there's a requirement that PEPs must follow the "emacs convention" of 2 spaces after a period. (I didn't know this was an emacs convention, I thought it was a convention of people who used typewriters.)
I've tried hard to maintain this textual convention in my own PEPs, even though it's very unnatural to me. But I see from looking at the other PEPs that that this convention is very inconsistently enforced - some have it and some don't. Worse, I've had one person (who apparently wasn't aware of the rule) flag my use of extra space after a period as a bug in my PEP. (When I first learned to type, I used one space after a period. Then years later, someone convinced me that two spaces was the proper style and so I switched to that for a few years. But later I switched back because I realized that most modern typographical layout engines seem to calculate inter-sentence spacing properly when the number of space characters after a period is one. And in HTML [which is how most people view PEPs anyway] it doesn't matter since the browser is going to filter out the extra space anyway.) So if we're not going to enforce the rule consistently (and it seems as if we're not), can we then just remove it from PEP 9? I'm not saying that we should change the rule to one space, I'm suggesting that we just drop the requirement and let people use whatever they prefer. -- Talin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
