On 2011-07-22, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 6:59 AM, Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote: >> Under the assumption that leading white space is important for >> code formatting, but that all alignment after that is >> unimportant. > > ...unless you're trying to adhere to a line length limit. "80 > characters" is a lot easier to do in a fixed-width font, and > "10 inches" or "400 pixels" or however you want to do it in a > proportional font effectively limits you to using that specific > font, at that specific size.
You can fit much more code per unit of horizontal space with a proportionally spaced font. As a result, that issue, while valid, is significantly reduced. Of some concern are consecutive underscores. Unless your font is designed specifically for programming, it can be hard to distinguish from a single underscore. You generally need to use a programming-specialized font even when using fixed width, though, so I'm not sure this issue is unique. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list