On 3/20/07, Christoph Zwerschke [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Chuck Esterbrook schrieb:
What about [EMAIL PROTECTED]'s suggestion:
What if you stayed with tabs and then added a converter, so that you
can quickly convert the tabs to the number of spaces that you want?
In fact, this might be a good idea for a lot of free source Python
projects distributed on the web -- though I would suspect it would be
better to use tabs as the default and offer the ability to convert to
space because sometimes it's possible it might not look quite right
converting a project coded for spaces to tabs.
It allows everyone to use their favorite approach.
You mentioned something about patches being a mess, but I don't see
why. People could send in patches as all spaces or all tabs or am
I not thinking of something?
I saw the problem in converting to the number of spaces that you want.
As long as the converter uses a fixed size, it would not be a mess.
Why couldn't it be to the number that you want and then back? That
might be nice. Some people like 2, some 3 and some 4. A clever tabify
could even detect it.
But nevermind because I see your point further below.
It still would be inconvenient, because you always have to think about
this issue and either convert back and forth manually, or use a script,
or change the settings in your editor. I'm working with a lot of Python
code from various sources, and they all use 4 spaces for indentation
since it's recommended in PEP8. I do not even need to think about tabs
and tab sizes any more, it's only Webware where I need to worry.
Well, actually why do you need to worry? I set my editor to Tab Size =
4 years ago and that was it. You can even do Tab = 3 or Tab = 2 if
your preference is different than mine.
It's not a big deal and I can live with tabs very well, but if we want
to change, this release would be a good opportunity.
Ah ha! You said, I can live with tabs very well.
But even if we did it, I'd prefer any major change after the 1.0 release.
I suppose there would then be a burden on people who use spaces to
invoke a script prior to checkin, but could that also be done via a
script? Something like:
# ci
tabify -r .
svn ci $*
spacify -r .
I'm not sure how to do this on the server (repository) side. On the
client side people also use IDEs or TortoiseSVN to check code in. And
this should only run for Webware, not for other projects. Generally I
don't like too much automagic because then you always have to worry
whether it is really active etc.
Yeah I see what you're saying about IDEs, Tortoise, etc. Good point.
I still think that leaving tabs in place allows people to set the size
to what they want.
I read that Guido likes 4 spaces, but Google, where he now works,
mandates 2. If Guido had mandated tabs and tabs only (1 per indent)
then people could use whatever they want. If he's now mandating 4
spaces for future versions of Python, then he's ramming his preference
down his coworkers' throat. (In this argument, I'll also add a rule of
no tabs after indentation.) On the other hand, maybe he has other
reasons for doing it (normalizing Python source code appearance in
print, for example).
-Chuck
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