Re: On Tabs and Spaces

From: Michael Witten <mfwitten@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 17, 2007, 09:09 UTC
Message-ID: <E29971BA-7306-4570-8383-26D0C9C0B814@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <3A9408D5-2667-43A6-A0CE-C0720B3A3987@vicaya.com>

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!

Consider:

     # calculates the extra space required to
     # use the given number of spaces/tab.
     size()
     {
         count=`grep -RIo "\`printf \"\t\"\`" . | wc -l`;
         perl -e "print $count*$(($1-1))/1024/1024 . \" MB\n\"";
     }

     Then in in a git working tree:

         size 8; # 1.28701210021973 MB
         size 4; # 0.551576614379883 MB

     In a linux kernel working tree:

         size 8; # 61.4902725219727 MB
         size 4; # 26.3529739379883 MB

Conclusion:

     Yikes!

I hate tabs, but I can't argue with that!

Michael Witten

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