python中缩进在程序中_Python中可能存在混合缩进？

Looking at this question, I tried OP's the code on my machine. Here are a text version and a screenshot:

What just happened? This supposed to be a square function, and it is implemented correctly. To be sure, I copy-pasted the code, and tried it again:

Well, I can't see any difference between these versions of square, but only the latter works.

The only reason I can think of is that I may have mixed tabs and spaces, so the return statement is actually indented, and so the loop is executed exactly once. But I could not reproduce it, and it looks like an unbelievable flaw in the interpreter's mixed-indentation-check. So I have two questions, or maybe three:

What do I miss?

If this is a mixed indentation thing, what it may be, exactly?

If this is a mixed indentation thing, why wasn't it caught by the interpreter? Obviously the whole idea of indentation in python (and in general) is to avoid such problems. And it's too important to let such things slip.

解决方案

Easy!

def square(x):

runningtotal = 0

for counter in range(x):

runningtotal = runningtotal + x

return runningtotal

First, tabs are replaced (from left to right) by one to eight spaces

such that the total number of characters up to and including the

replacement is a multiple of eight <...>

So this tab at the last line is replace with 8 spaces and it gets into the loop.