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
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