It’s an issue when generating python, I can tell you from experience. It’s also a pain to not be able to safely rely on an auto formatter
replyEvery python developer I know uses an auto formatter today, and never needs to think about it (ruff, black). It's not ambiguous and is immediately visible if something has the wrong indent.
reply(On other projects, I often wish other languages had formatters as good and standard as the Python ecosystem. I have many complaints about Python but whitespace is just not a problem I've seen)
Today and forever, I was using ActiveState IDEs back in the day, I started using Python in version 1.6.
replyAlso it isn't the only one, many ML derived languages also use indentation, including the famous F#, Standard ML, OCaml, Haskell,....
You missed the point. I’m well aware python has formatters, I use them and implemented my own. The point was that when generating/manipulating python code you cannot just generate in whatever format then run a formatter. you need to carefully keep track of the exact indentation at place where the code in written
replyFair. That is a very slight friction on what is quite a small niche, though (compared to the wider ecosystem of developers). And most that need similar will use AST or runtime construction.
replyThe trivial kind of raw source generation is still trivial, but I'm guessing you're doing embedding/templates or something?
It’s definitely niche!
replyIf I were doing this, and the code generator was itself in Python, I'd probably use ast and/or tokenize to avoid having to manipulate literal whitespace.
replyHave you never tried to paste python code from the internet into an editor? At least half the time the indentation is screwed up and I have to go in and figure out manually where to put the spaces in. Indentation gets screwed up by pasting in other languages too, but with those I can generally tell the editor to reindent and it can because the information is included in the source code.
replyPython's significant indentation does have real costs, but they mostly don't affect experienced programmers working on real codebases in real editors or IDEs. Rather, they are things like, it makes the REPL more cumbersome, and newbies sometimes find that code they copy-paste from the Web mysteriously fails to work.
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