I wasn't advocating inline markup -- I think that that would certainly be a downgrade.  I was wondering if it would be possible to turn this whitespace check off globally since I generally thing that extra whitespace before a literal or token like this can improve readability.  Unfortunately, it doesn't look like one can do that effectively.  The pep8 tool parses this as spaces after commas (and `[` and whatever else), not spaces before literals, so it can't easily be turned off without letting through a bunch of other genuine problems.  *sigh*.  Maybe with some preprocessing this could be achieved.  I just hate to throw out good violations of PEP8 because we want to eliminate bad violations elsewhere.