From: Andreas Ericsson Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:17:45 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC3 09/13] send-email: Remove horrible mix of tabs and spaces Message-ID: <49E43899.7070804@op5.se> In-Reply-To: <7vws9n92q3.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> Junio C Hamano wrote: > Andreas Ericsson writes: > >> Using tabs to align stuff to indentation level and spaces to align >> line continuation is the only possible way to let users choose >> whichever indentation depth they want while preserving the continuation >> alignment. > > Sure, it will look aligned with whatever width of HT ">": > > >>if (this is a looong > >>....expression that is alighed) { > >>>statement1; > >>>statement2; > >>} > > but it is *only true* if your SP "." and everything else is of the same > width. > > People seem to repeat that without realizing what they are saying, but I > find the assumption the argument is based on quite bogus. Why do people > think it is only sane to assume flexible HT width but still monospaced > font whose SP, l and w are all of the same width? > Because 99% of all editors designed for programming use a fixed-width font by default for precisely that reason, and all others can be set to display fixed-width fonts without losing much (if any) readability, but indentation comes in 2*$number_of_programmers variations. > You either forget about the alignment (there is no such thing---suck it > up), or use time honored HT=8 and monospace convention. > Or you use "indent with tabs, align with spaces" and let those who use a word processor for programming go hang. It's quite common actually. Or you use some own homecooked style of indentation that's quite obvious *to you* Either way, a project's founding father always sets the style, and those who contribute get to either follow it or provide some pretty strong argument to change it (a lot better than: "A few of the lines were aligning function arguments via tabs and a few extra spaces, which is not reliable in my model. Frankly, I don't like tabs and spaces sharing the same contiguous block. I don't like it all." -- Andreas Ericsson andreas.ericsson@op5.se OP5 AB www.op5.se Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231 Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war on peace.