Nobody should be encouraged to change their editor. Neither do you know why the person chose the editor they chose, nor do you actually help in solving the problem the person has.
To try to answer to the substance of the complaint about indentation-driven structure: when Python was created, the trend in formatting of structured text was to eliminate punctuation as much as possible. It was (naively) believed that punctuation makes code harder to read (it was also the time when various languages with abundant (eg. C) or very monotonous (Common Lisp) punctuation were mocked for these specific qualities. Some, like in the ALGOL family of languages chose to replace punctuation with words (eg. begin procedure X ... end procedure), but this was seen as not satisfactory because it drowned the important identifiers in the sea of syntactical "noise". Python, as well as eg. YAML chose to rely on indentation. This created its own set of problems: the more levels of indentation there is, the harder it is for a programmer to recognize the structure. This also made parsing programs unnecessarily more difficult, since the languages were no longer context-free. Moving structural pieces of code around became more difficult. At the time, the counter-argument was that this restriction also enforces good taste: compelling programmers to write shorter functions or other control structures. I don't buy this argument because, in practice, a programmer will often deal with the code written by another programmer, who didn't necessarily want to write short low-complexity bits of code, and will suffer the consequences. If there's any conclusion to be drawn from the history of the use of punctuation, it seems to me that moderation is more important than the selected approach. Selecting multiple approaches at the same time (eg. Haskell: both indentation-defined structure and a lot of punctuation) gives the worst results overall. Moderate and consistent use of punctuation that is still visually diverse enough to identify structure (eg. Prolog) is the best, in my view. I believe that the Python creators chose wrong. Was it possible to know back in the day? -- I can't tell. From what I know about the history of Python, in its early days it wasn't intended for the role it plays today. It was more of a teaching aid, not intended for serious, large programs. Perhaps its purpose informed the choice. But, likely, it was just an accident of following the fashion trends without much analysis. You can see this aspect of Python as "technical debt", but it's a kind of debt that's unlikely to be ever repaid due to a lot of technical difficulties that changing such a decision would entail. So, like it or not, the indentation-driven structure will stay in Python in the overseeable future. On Tue, Dec 16, 2025 at 5:58 AM Greg Ewing via Python-list <[email protected]> wrote: > > Any decent programming editor will have a facility for selecting a group > of lines and adding/removing the appropriate commenting characters. > > (If your editor doesn't have that, then by definition it's not decent. :-) > -- > https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/python-list.python.org -- https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/python-list.python.org
