On Mon, 19 Jun 2006 at 16:43 -0600, Gregory Hill wrote: > I've tried doing 4-space, and 2-space tabs, spaces instead of tabs, etc. > I think I'm going to go back to tab characters. It makes the file > smaller, and whoever reads the code can see it however they want to see > it by setting their own tab-stops. I never understood why people are so
Fine, if you're using 8-space tabs. If you're using n-space tabs where n<8 then do us all a favor and expand your tabs. Or at least check for alignment and 80-columns with 8-space tabs. The problem here is not just us 8-space fanatics, but whenever you try to cat, print, less, or anything else that isn't superconfigured for your tab preference. I really hate printing something that ends up with a gazillion wrapped lines just because the guy who otherwise fit everything in 80 columns decided to use tabs when he really should have used 4 spaces. Any decent editor makes it easy to type tab and get 4 spaces (and likewise to type backspace and back up 4 spaces). But there are a lot of programs that will translate tab into 8 characters. Let's just use occam's razor and keep it simple, folks. Tabs are 8 spaces. If you want something else, use spaces. While I'm here I might as well weigh in on the rest of the opinions. :) I like 4 spaces in C-like languages, 2 spaces in ruby or XML. I don't buy the "8-space tabs in C if you can't read it you're an idiot programmer" argument, and I really don't buy it for C++ or Java or anything else where you might have a gratuitous indentation level from being inside a class or whatnot. I find that frequently it takes nearly 60 characters to write a decent line of code using some APIs or well-named variables, and breaking lines is almost always less readable than not breaking them, so 8-space indentation makes a real mess sooner rather than later. I do believe in keeping it to 80 chars per line because of the printing and cat/less usage previously mentioned, and because I think it's generally more readable (even if you do have to split uberlong lines). -- Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach
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