> I think the various Unicode whitespace characters are likely to gain more use generally.
I'm curious what you expect these increased usage to stem from, and how you feel that it will inevitably find its way into source files.
> The big problem though is that whitespace characters all look alike and so you can't read and parse the way a computer does.
In general, the editor takes care of indentation for the programmer. What developer is going to add (e.g.) non-breaking spaces as an option for indententation in the development tool that they maintain?
If you're worried about copy-pasting, then that's already an issue in some places. I've had SQL break because the whitespace contained invisible characters due to an encoding issue during copy-paste, and PostgreSQL (IIRC, could have been Oracle) wasn't very helpful in diagnosing the issue.
Unexpected invisible characters cropping up anywhere are going to give you issues, Python or not.
I'm curious what you expect these increased usage to stem from, and how you feel that it will inevitably find its way into source files.
> The big problem though is that whitespace characters all look alike and so you can't read and parse the way a computer does.
In general, the editor takes care of indentation for the programmer. What developer is going to add (e.g.) non-breaking spaces as an option for indententation in the development tool that they maintain?
If you're worried about copy-pasting, then that's already an issue in some places. I've had SQL break because the whitespace contained invisible characters due to an encoding issue during copy-paste, and PostgreSQL (IIRC, could have been Oracle) wasn't very helpful in diagnosing the issue.
Unexpected invisible characters cropping up anywhere are going to give you issues, Python or not.