On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 7:36 AM, Paul Eggert <[email protected]> wrote: > behoffski wrote: >> >> One easy way to spot tab characters in C sources > > > This is grep, right? So we should use "grep ' '". > > Jim Meyering has the strongest feeling about tabs, so I assume he'll pick > this one up.
Hi Brenton, I do indeed have strong feelings about tabs :-) Like remove all leading ones, and any TAB-after-space. [rules to enforce that are in maint.mk and cfg.mk] However, a few times when a crusade led me to do what you're proposing and eliminate all of them, I later realized that I found value in TAB-aligned comments, and actually regretted performing that particular TAB->SP+ conversion. On a code normalization front, I am inclined to fully automate the process, and have spent time (though not recently) trying to find the combination of settings in the uncrustify tool that recreate the style we use in a few projects. If you feel like pursuing this, please look at uncrustify and see if you can minimize the changes required to move grep to something uncrustify-generated. Bottom line, I'm not terribly keen on changing comment-aligning tabs to spaces. Thanks, Jim
