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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Python (was Re: I did not inhale)
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2024 13:36:43 +0200
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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.