On 29-nov-2005, at 18:33, Louis Pecora wrote: > What the heck were they (Guido?) thinking when they used 4 spaces > as the one true mode of indentation for Python?
Initially Python was unix-only, and there (at that time) a tab was 8 spaces and that is that, no problem with mixing tab/spaces. Then the Mac (and later dos/windows) joined the scene, which had 4-space tabs. Then it was deemed mixing tab/space was bad (because code got ugly or even didn't work when ported between 4- and 8-space tabs. Because at that time most editors (both on Unix and Windows) still did not have the feature to set how many spaces a tabstop was it was decided to go with spaces for indenting: going with tabs would have meant unix- heads would be stuck with unusable 8-space indents. -- Jack Jansen, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
