On Sunday, March 19, 2017 at 1:11:45 PM UTC-7, Mikhail V wrote: > Trying to line up things after a non-whitespace character, e.g. like this? > > myList = [ > ["a", "b", "c"], > ["mess up your alignment", "b", "c"], > ["a", "b", "c"] > ] > > Well there is no easy solution possible, especially if you want it > to look exactly the same on all computers and editors. > Before something like elastic tabstops will be a standard, > it will continue to confuse people. > Spaces are still one of the worst solutions, although it will > give same results on monospaced editors.
This is a good example of exactly WHY I continue to write code using monospaced fonts, and spaces for indentation. The results are unambiguous. If I want vertical alignment between specific characters in different rows, I can have it. I am not only interested in the indentation of the first character in a line of code. Yes, sometimes I have to adjust the spacing manually, but I can live with that. Now, my word-processing documents make full use of styles, and in that context I've transcended tabs completely. For casual documents I might find myself falling back into the email-like habit of pushing "Enter" twice between paragraphs. But when it's time to get serious, I define an appropriate paragraph style. I have read about elastic tabstops. If they become a standard and address my needs (it looks like they should), I will be happy to switch. If you want to make your head spin, investigate how to represent polyphonic musical notation in a data structure that ensures it will be drawn accurately on staff paper, as well as played correctly by a synthesizer. Code is child's play by comparison. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
