Mike Stover wrote:
When you get diffs with tabs, CVS will insert '-' and '+' characters. With tabs, the formatting goes to hell and it can be difficult to understand in which block changes occur. This is my experience. With spaces this is never a problem.-1, tabs are being dropped by most projects because they make interpretation of the diffs harder, different editors interpret them differently, etc.
I don't see how it affects diffs.
And editors interpreting them differently is the whole point.Not sure what you mean. The official Sun style guide distinguishes between tabs and indents. Tabs always take you to a tabstop at multiples of 8. I believe this is also the emacs standard. So when you set an indent size of 4, the first indent is implemented with 4 spaces and the second level by 1 tab.
A lot of editors, OTOH, use tabs as the indent marker, so setting an indent size of 4, causes that editor to use 1 tab for the first indent and 2 tabs for the second indent.
Now think about how the code from each editor looks in the other editor
Case 1:
if (tabs != indent) {
looksBadlyIndented();
}
Case 2:
if (tabs == indent) {
looksBadToo();
}
By using spaces I can be sure that code rendered in your editor is the same as code rendered in my editor - we see the same thing - and that is good.
So, editors interpreting tabs differently is a bad thing because people will tend to reformat the code to look right in their editor. :-)
In the end this is probably a religious issue bu the above is why I prefer spaces.
Conor
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
