Bill Coderre wrote:
Perhaps a better solution would be to agree on a spaces-tabs exchange rates
That would negate the main benefit of using tabs (only), which is precisely that they *don't* represent any fixed amount of indentation. You can set your editor to display them using whatever spacing you prefer. Unfortunately, the totally haphazard way that the various tools out there handle tabs makes it impractical to use them this way outside of a controlled environment. Given that, the convention of four-space indents makes sense as an *interchange* format. Use whatever works best for you internally, but convert to four-space indents when sharing code with others. Cookies wouldn't really help unless all the tools out there (not just text editors, but print formatters, mail and news handlers, etc.) understood them. And if we had the power to make them do that, we could make them handle tabs in a consistent way in the first place, and we wouldn't have a problem. -- Greg
