Hello, I occasionally still glance at GRASS e-mails sometimes, and this
thread just caught my eye!
On 20/08/14 22:35, Vaclav Petras wrote:
On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 5:14 PM, Markus Neteler <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The discussion was in 2008, for some pointers, see
http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2008-April/037622.html
...
Thanks Markus for the links. In the emails I see a lot of discussion
about tab being 8 spaces wide versus some other width. And I see that 8
spaces for a tab is probably the ideal (at least it was).* However, I
don't see the reasons for having first level of indent 4 spaces and
second 1 tab.
I think there was no discussion of it at the time simply because no one
disagreed with Glynn's suggestion for 4-space indents! Certainly I have
always felt it is a nice length. Any shorter and it is hard to see the
indentation at a glance; any longer and long lines can start to
disappear off the right-hand edge of your screen, requiring horizontal
scrolling, which can quickly get very annoying.
Using a tab character instead of 8 spaces also saves 7 bytes from the
length of the file.
This means that first level of indent is 1/2 of a tab? I
don't think this is a good idea.
Well it is no problem if all developers always use 8-character tabs. I
agree it can seem a bit "ugly" though. If mixed tabs and spaces were to
be banned my preference would always be to replace tabs with 8 spaces
(although that would add 7 extra bytes per tab to the filesize!).
* If you are using only tabs it really does not matter "how long" tab
(in spaces) is because indentation levels are defined in number of tabs
(not spaces) and the number is natural number (naturally).
Well it would mean all developers would need to set the tab spacing in
their editors to 4 spaces (in order for files to appear the same as
now). So it would mean requiring extra effort on the part of the
majority of people who use 8-character tabs, just to cater to the
minority who like to use tabs of a different length. I'm just playing
devil's adocate there of course, but if it had to be changed I
definitely think all spaces (a la FFmpeg) is a better option than all
tabs...
Perhaps a survey as to the tab settings used by all GRASS developers
would be a good idea?
Paul
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