Dan Williams wrote:
There's always modelines, and as long as everyone agrees that a tab is the same width (enforced with modelines and whatnot), the code is always readable anyway. It's completely the same problem. If you choose spaces, everyone has to agree on (a) using spaces in the first place, and (b) agree on an indent width, either 4 or 8 spaces. If you choose tabs, everyone has to agree on (a) using tabs in the first place, and (b) agree on a tab width, either 4 or 8 "spaces". It's exactly the same choice either way, and making somebody else use spaces is exactly the same thing as making somebody use tabs. Obviously the world would be a better place if everyone had exactly the same opinions... :)
FWIW my tab stops are at 8, and the code is misindented in places as a result (usually function declarations). And my editor (Emacs) doesn't skip leading spaces or treat them as blocks, but it's never bothered me (it does otherwise handle indentation well). I guess I use Ctrl-Left/Right for much of my navigation anyway.
The issue I see is that tabs and spaces look identical, and so are easily confused as a reader. There's other problems, like tabs getting lost of expanded. Entering a tab in a browser textarea can be hard. When I paste code into Thunderbird it expands tabs to spaces. Generally tabs seem like they should be nice -- everyone uses exactly one tab per indentation level, you can set the width however you want, etc -- but in practice there seem to be more problems than advantages.
Generally speaking visually identical but semantically different characters seem really bad -- especially for beginner programmers (for whom this code should be accessible) -- and certainly the space character isn't going away...
-- Ian Bicking | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://blog.ianbicking.org _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar
