On Tabs and Spaces

From: Michael Witten <mfwitten@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 16, 2007, 06:45 UTC
Message-ID: <634393B0-734A-4884-93E3-42F7D3CB157F@mit.edu>

What are the rules about tabs and spaces in source code?

I'm having a terrible time with formatting, especially in the perl scripts; there is a mix of spaces and tabs.

from what I can deduce, single tabs are used to introduce the equivalent of 8 spaces while 4 explicit spaces are used for half a tab.

I would recommend using all spaces, but the C code seems to prefer all tabs.

In any case, some kind of standards need to be set, because no one is following anything curr- ently.

Sincerely, Michael Witten

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.