- From: Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake@acm.org>
- Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 01:10:38 -0400
- To: Curt Arnold <carnold@houston.rr.com>
- Cc: www-dom@w3.org
[...long discussion of "whitespace" vs. "white space"...]
This may not be directly relevant, but taking a quick grep trip ("grep
-i '...' */*.tex | wc -l") through the Python documentation shows 114
occurances of "whitespace" and 2 for "white space".
Part of the general shift toward "whitespace" may be a matter of using
the term to mean "characters that represent what might be presented as
white space" rather than to the white space on a page. It's easy to
think of "white space" when something is conceptually mapped to a
sheet of paper, but harder when it's not intended for any presentation
to a human: spaces/tabs/newlines are very important in HTTP headers,
but there's not normally any presentation of that data, so there isn't
any "white space", but programmers still think of them as "whitespace"
characters that are useful in separating tokens.
-Fred
--
Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation
Received on Wednesday, 6 August 2003 01:10:56 UTC