On Sat, Aug 19, 2000 at 03:50:56PM -0700, Joe Rhett wrote:
> While you are starting in on the new code version, would you *please*
> remind your developers that manually spacing the code indentation is *NOT*
> polite in open-source projects?
>
> By always using tabs for indentation, you allow the developer/maintainer to
> set their tab width to their own preferences and work easily in that
> fashion. When they save their changes, another developer can see the
> changes in whatever indentation setting they prefer.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing, but tabs are evil and must be destroyed.
Your own reasoning shows the problem - your tabs may not be the same
as my tabs. Most serious Unix developers use the One True Tab Setting
(every 8 positions), so your solution involving indentation by tabs
only makes the code much too wide, and it is often impossible to
neatly line things up without using spaces. I personally prefer a
two-character indent for Perl code, and most C programmers
I know ident blocks by 8 and continued expressions by 4. And we all
hate code that wraps off the edge of the screen. It's just not
realistically possible to have people with different tab settings
work on the same code. One has to learn to adapt to other people's
style when morking on their code, even if it's personally annoying.
For a multi-developer project, it is very important to pick a style
and enforce it consistently, but that's for Tucows to do internally.
I think they're much better off using spaces than even saying "thou
shalt use 8-character tabs". After all, there may be a few people
with obscure minority operating systems like AmigaDOS, Windows and
MacOS trying to look at the code.
--
Christopher Masto Senior Network Monkey NetMonger Communications
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netmonger.net
Free yourself, free your machine, free the daemon -- http://www.freebsd.org/
