On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 9:09 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> Personally, I like to use the tab _key_ as an input device, but to have >> my editor write real spaces to the file in consequence. With pure >> spaces, the text is laid out reliably for us both. And so I have my >> editor set to that behaviour. > > I have reluctantly come to do the same thing. There is a plethora of broken > tools out there that don't handle tabs well, and consequently even though > tabs for indentation are objectively better, I use spaces because it is > less worse than the alternative.
This. I used to think that tabs were better, for pretty much the reasons Rick outlined, but I've had enough problems with editors munging my tabs that I eventually found it simpler in practice to just go with the flow and use spaces. Of course, there is also another major problem with tabs that I have not seen pointed out yet, which is that it's not possible to strictly adhere to 80-column lines with tabs. I can write my code to 80 columns using 4-space tabs, but if somebody later tries to edit the file using 8-space tabs, their lines will be too long. Rick's answer to this might be to just mandate that everybody uses 4-space tabs, but then this would pretty much defeat the purpose of using tabs in the first place. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list