Re: On Tabs and Spaces
- From
Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
- Date
- Oct 17, 2007, 22:36 UTC
- Message-ID
- <47168E70.4070305@op5.se>
- In-Reply-To
- <k5pll7rb.fsf@blue.sea.net>
Jari Aalto wrote:
Show 24 quoted lines
> * Wed 2007-10-17 Michael Witten <mfwitten@MIT.EDU> > * Message-Id: E29971BA-7306-4570-8383-26D0C9C0B814@mit.edu >> On 17 Oct 2007, at 3:17:08 AM, Luke Lu wrote: >> >>> But I still haven't seen any compelling arguments against the "all >>> space" case >> Overhead! >> >> If you use 8 spaces instead of one tab, >> that's using up 7x more space! > > Software is the right place to worry about optimization. We should trust > SCM to make proper and efficient deltas. If not, algorithms need > improvemnts. > > Any cross platform development or electronic exchange is guaranteed to > be interpreted correctly when policy enforces "only spaces" > > As we have already seen in numerous times in this thread, using tabs > will - eventually - be interpreted in some editor, in some display, in > some encironment using some tools ... incorrectly or different than the > author intended. Simply because editors are configurable and we cannot > know what settings they may have when they load the file in. >
And simply because nearly all (unix) editors still insert a hard tab when pressing the tab key, and *mixing* tabs and spaces makes the situation *really* unbearable, one really shouldn't use all spaces.
It's code, not graphics. If it's really horrible, any editor can be configured to change the non-default tab-setting back to 8 if that's the problem. Mine's set to 4. Primarily because I think 8 is too much. Sometimes (roughly once every 2 years), that gives me problem. It's exclusively when someone has consciously mixed tabs and spaces. Using either or *never* gives any problem.
> There is no such problem with spaces. >
I beg to differ, for reasons stated multiple times elsewhere in this thread.
> The storage constraints are insignificant given the disk space vs. cost;
Perhaps, but it's low-hanging fruit and since all spaces have its issues too, why not just go with tabs?
-- Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson@op5.se OP5 AB www.op5.se Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231