Tabs are evil, period.
Using tabs in source files means that every editor, viewer, pretty
printer that is used to process them needs to agree on where the tab
stops are. This is harder to achieve as the program reaches more people.
That we are having a Tabs vs. Spaces debate is a consequence of us
programming with mono-spaced fonts, which is not the only way to write
programs. A peek at Knuth's books or The C++ Programming Language ought
to convince you that programming in a proportional font would make your
program that much more pleasant to read. Of course, in that context,
you have to use Tabs for indenting and use Spaced for spacing. Using
spaces for indenting would be evil.
--
Weiqi Gao
[email protected]
http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/
On 07/01/2010 05:27 AM, Paul King wrote:
I tend to be in the 'tabs are evil camp' most of the time. Not that they
are evil but there are some missing rules in Reinier's list. Rule 3: If
you use tabs you must use them everywhere - you can't mix and match and
everyone else must too. Rule 4: Every tool in your toolset including all
future ones must support and allow customisation of tab sizes. If I am
browsing source diffs through fisheye and it converts tabs to 8 spaces
for display purposes, that might be fine on a large screen but less
useful on a mobile phone. In fact, this is the exact scenario where tabs
could be so useful but with many tools, they just aren't right now. It's
certainly better than it was 10 years ago but still has some way to go IMHO.
Still, it's not something to get too worried about - you should be able
to convert from one style to the other with a keystroke in most IDEs.
Paul.
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:48 PM, Mark Volkmann <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm surprised that all the replies to this thread are in favor of tabs
over spaces. In my experience, the vast majority of developers favor
spaces. For me there is one main reason I prefer spaces ... printers.
Sometimes I print code. Printers seem to always use eight spaces for
tabs which causes many lines to wrap and makes it harder to read the
code. If there were a universal way to adjust that then I'd be okay
with using tabs for indentation.
This is the same reason why I don't like when lines are longer than 80
characters. Many of the lines will wrap when printed. Also, I find it
harder to read code with long lines. That's why newspaper columns
don't extend all the way across wide newspaper pages.
--
R. Mark Volkmann
Object Computing, Inc.
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