On 26/07/11 00:05, Ethan Furman wrote: > Ed Leafe wrote: >> Religious fervor is one thing; freedom of religion is another! ;-) >> >> We strive for readability in our code, yet every printed material >> designed to be read, such as books, newspapers, etc., uses a >> proportional font. > > The books I purchase use monospaced fonts for code examples. Yours don't?
Strange that. Most do, but that's really just tradition. I have Bjarne Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" on my shelf, and that prints code in a proportional font. There are two possible reasons to prefer a monospaced font for code: 1. You're used to it: tradition. This is a legacy of the era when computers simply didn't display proportional fonts. 2. Your editor (my usual preference, Vim, is an example) doesn't support proportional fonts. This is a legacy of the era when computers simply didn't display proportional fonts. Code is different from prose. We parse it so differently that printing it in a monospaced font doesn't significantly hurt readability - but it doesn't make it more readable either. In the end, it really doesn't matter. This is probably why I enjoyed writing this message so much. Thomas -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list