Re: Python (was Re: I did not inhale)

On 23/08/2024 10:29, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 23 Aug 2024 09:19:06 +0200, David Brown wrote:
 

On 23/08/2024 02:19, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>

On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 12:47:16 +0200, David Brown wrote:
>

But it is quite happy with
mixtures of tabs and spaces as long as the result after tab-to-space
conversion is consistent with Python syntax.

>
Mixtures of tabs and spaces are accepted without complaint.

 I understood you to mean that different mixtures of tabs and spaces would
work, so long as they were equivalent to the same indentation under the 8-
spaces = 1 tab rule that you cited.

That is what I was thinking, but I was not very clear or accurate.

 In fact there is no such equivalence rule. Tabs are tabs, and spaces are
spaces, and never the twain shall be interconvertible.

There /was/ such an equivalence rule in Python 2 - but it has been more restrictive in Python 3.  I was not aware of the extent of the difference until recently.

 

(The incompatibilities between Python 2 and Python 3 are another pain in
Python.

 The fundamental problem was that Unicode was a mess in Python 2 that
needed to be cleaned up. Since they had no choice but to break backward
compatibility in that regard, they figured they would fix a few other
things while they were at it.

That's one thing - arguably quite a bit thing, but only one of many differences.
Basically, there were lots of aspects of Python that they felt could be improved or done in better ways, but would break compatibility.  Python has always had the philosophy that major version numbers did not need maximal compatibility - similar things happened between Python 1 and Python 2.  The difference is that Python was massively more popular by the 2 to 3 change than it was at the 1 to 2 change, and there is still vast amounts of Python 2 code and libraries that are not available or easily convertible to Python 3.