[John]

> Mark, would you give it a review this month?

Apologies; my holiday-break free time was nobbled from unexpected quarters. I can't promise to find time this month, but I can promise to try. I did at least skim through the PR, and while there are still likely some iterations needed I'm satisfied that this is technically feasible.

But I'm afraid that's the easy part. If this is to go in, the other problem we still have to solve is achieving some consensus among the core developers that this is worth doing. Right now, judging by comments on this issue, I think I'm the only core dev who thinks this is a good idea; others are lukewarm at best, and I'm not willing to unilaterally approve and merge these changes without something closer to a consensus. There are a couple of ways forward here:

- Post the proposal on python-ideas to get wider visibility and feedback. If everyone agrees this is a great idea (from experience, this seems an unlikely outcome), then we can go ahead and merge. Otherwise we'd likely need a PEP to move forward.

- Bypass the python-ideas step, write the PEP, discuss in the appropriate forums, and then submit to the SC for approval / rejection.

- Convince Eric Smith. :-) With apologies to Eric for singling him out: Eric could reasonably be described as the steward/maintainer of the formatting machinery, so if he's persuaded, that's good enough for me.

The fact that you've already created a working implementation so that people can experiment is a bonus when it comes to trying to sell this to others.

I don't have the bandwidth to write a PEP, but I would be happy to act as PEP sponsor.