From: David Kågedal Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:15:53 GMT Subject: Re: On Tabs and Spaces Message-ID: <87k5pkzydy.fsf@lysator.liu.se> In-Reply-To: <47168E70.4070305@op5.se> Andreas Ericsson writes: > Jari Aalto wrote: >> * Wed 2007-10-17 Michael Witten >> * 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. I guess that means that you consider emacs to be an obscure or non-unix editor? When you press TAB while editing program code in emacs it doesn't insert a hard tab. It reindents the current line according to the indentation rules. The whitespace at the beginning of the line is filled with spaces and/or tabs, depending on the indent-tabs-mode setting. -- David Kågedal