Chuck Esterbrook <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 11:32 PM 8/11/2001 -0400, Clark C . Evans wrote:
> > Sorry about that... but after monkeying around
> > with my editor and stuff... I just plain give up.
> > Why are you all using TABs anyway! *shudders*
>
> Because TABs rule. ;-)
>
> I shudder whenever I have to cursor through hordes of spaces as well as
> give up extra RAM and hard drive space.
I could understand the RAM and hard drive argument if it was 1982,
perhaps. Anyway, if you want to cursor fast use Ctrl-left/right or
somesuch. Any good editor has ways to navigate quickly.
> Most people solve this problem by using a nice editor. I recommend
> UltraEdit, BBEdit or emacs depending on your platform.
Emacs causes all sorts of problems with tabs. The tab key in Emacs is
overloaded to mean indent-as-appropriate, so you can't really be
explicit. You can make it indent with tabs, but then it is a royal
pain to edit files with spaces. Also, I don't really know any way to
make it indent continued lines properly -- it puts in tabs to replace
every 4 spaces, not just for the initial indent. So what looks like:
a = b + \
c
to me, looks like:
a = b + \
c
To someone with eight-space tabs. This makes my code look ugly,
though at least it causes no syntactic errors.
I won't tell you the horrors of trying to edit a spaced file with tabs
on.
A dumb editor like pico (i.e., one for which all files are plain text)
doesn't care, and tabs are easy enough -- well, as long as you know
what the current file uses... god forbid you edit some code and use a
tab where spaces are called for or visa versa. If you do that you're
asking for a world of pain.
While all the other ASCII characters are pleasantly concrete, tabs are
not -- they are vague and unreliable, doubly worse when indentation
actually counts (i.e., Python). I wouldn't care so much about tabs
vs. spaces if it hadn't caused me all the grief it already has -- and
if that grief was not repeated everytime I work with non-Webware code
(which is almost universally indented with spaces).
Ian
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