So what should the goal of using space/tab correctly be? It must be to make the code as easy as possible to read. As written in the preface of SICP, "Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
Considering the following relation with regards to the ratio between writing and reading source code. Code is written just once by one person (by also including some of the editing, let us say that code is written somewhere in the range of 1 to 10 times). Reading the code however is done by many people, many times. We are here talking about a 2 digit number of persons as an absolute minimum, depending of how "read" is interpreted it could mean hundreds or thousands of developers around the world. This means that making the code easy to read is several orders of magnitude more important than making code easy to write from a layout perspective. In fact the readability of the code layout should be the _only_ criteria for choosing a given layout. How difficult it is to write such a layout is irrelevant. People have different preferences and there are no one-size-fits-all value for indentation width. Someone will always be dissatisfied if any fixed width is forced to be "standard". That would thus reduce the readability for parts of the developer base. Is anything I have written above untrue? Do you manage to disagree with any of it? (continued in part 2) _______________________________________________ parted-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/parted-devel
