Executive summary: I'd like to make three points.
1. Accessibility matters, and I think this change would be inaccessible to users of screen readers. 2. Yes, a variety of tools imposes a burden, but also confers benefits. 3. There's no such thing as "pretty source code." There are only tools that display source code beautifully. Down and dirty details: The first is new to this discussion: Let's not make life more annoying for the accessibility developers and the people who *need* accessibility accommodations. Not all visual puns are audible puns. "→" looks like "->", but "Unicode U+2192 RIGHTWARDS ARROW" sounds nothing like "HYPHEN GREATER-THAN". (I'm guessing at the pronunciation, I don't use a screen reader myself. OK, probably the reader just says "RIGHTWARDS ARROW" or even "RIGHTARROW", but it's still not close to the same.) At the very least, we should do a case-by-case check when we want to pun this way, and also ask an accessibility expert (better three) about whether screen readers make this connection, and if not, whether their users would be able to. Second, about Tower-of-Babelonian tool proliferation: Thierry Parmentelat writes: > people need to mess with solutions on the outside sphere - editors, > IDE’s, documentation post-processing - that essentially have no > chance to be sustainable, and/as it causes extra burden for > everybody This situation that has no chance to be sustainable obviously *is* sustainable. It's been this way for as long as I've been using computers (daily use for work or study since 1979). I very much doubt it is going to change, ever, because tools are personal. Yes, it causes a certain amount of burden for everybody, but it also provides great benefits for everybody, or network externalities would impel us to accept a common set of tools. > We should allow code to be natively pretty, and not rely on other > tools to do the prettifying job - or not There's no such thing as code being "natively pretty". Code (source code) is a sequence of bits grouped into bytes grouped into characters grouped into statements grouped into a file. I can't see the pits on a BD or the microwaves in a wireless connection, and I doubt you can. There are software tools doing a prettifying job every time source code is displayed, printed, or read out loud, and a mass audience language like Python needs to adapt to the tools of the mass audience. Yes, we humans can help relatively "dumb" tools do a better job of displaying pretty code (for example, "significant whitespace"), but it's the quality of tool that matters most. Fred Brooks had a good essay on "sharp tools", slightly off-point, in *The Mythical Man-Month*. (I'm pretty sure of the citation but unfortunately my copies of MMM are all at school for access by my students. :-) He advocated having a tool-building specialist on his "surgical team" of (proprietary) developers, but in the open source world, we all publish our tools, which is both the glory and the disaster of something like Emacs. There are also habits that won't change -- even if *you* habitually use one of the many right arrows in Unicode instead of "->", most of us will continue to touch-type "->", and you're going to have to read it. And code is eternal: 20 years from now, somebody's going to be upset about some misfeature in the stdlib, and they're going to have to read it. (Well, maybe not "->", depends on whether they need to look at the stub files, which is a "probably not", stub files are more useful to the Python compiler than to humans most of the time.) If you want all your Python code to use non-ASCII characters in the syntax whether you wrote it or not, *your tools will have to do it for you*. Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/RQORZK7MMUCXJAJEDMFIF2CQRMT5LFTW/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/