On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:01:19 +0200, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: > Steven D'Aprano a écrit : >> On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:03:29 +0200, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: >> >>> Steven D'Aprano a écrit : >>> >>> (snip) >>> >>>> You can use tabs, or spaces. If you use spaces, you can choose 4 >>>> spaces, or 8, or any number, >>> By all means, make it 4 spaces - that's the standard. >> >> It's *a* standard. I believe it is the standard for the Python standard >> library, but there are other standards. > > I can't remember having seen any other "standard" so far.
How about PEP 8? It's not even hidden deep in the bowels of the PEP -- it's almost at the top. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ "For really old code that you don't want to mess up, you can continue to use 8-space tabs." Then there's string.expandtabs(): expandtabs(...) S.expandtabs([tabsize]) -> string Return a copy of S where all tab characters are expanded using spaces. If tabsize is not given, a tab size of 8 characters is assumed. Here's Jamie Zawinski: http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html "On defaultly-configured Unix systems, and on ancient dumb terminals and teletypes, the tradition has been for the TAB character to mean ``move to the right until the current column is a multiple of 8.'' (As it happens, this is how Netscape interprets TAB inside <PRE> as well.) This is also the default in the two most popular Unix editors, Emacs and vi." This page is a little old (2002), but it states that the standards for OpenBSD and Linux (presumably the kernels) are 8 space indents: http://xarg.net/writing/tabs Here's a style guide that recommends 2, 3 or 4 space indents: http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Teaching/Resources/COMS12100/style/ And of course, whenever there's a difference of opinion, we can turn to the ultimate source of all knowledge: Googlefight! *wink* http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=tab+8 +spaces&word2=tab+4+spaces Nearly 50 million hits for "tab 8 spaces" versus a piddly 762 thousand hits for "tab 4 spaces". -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
