>On Nov 29, 2005, at 4:54 PM, Louis Pecora wrote: > >> Kent Quirk wrote: >> >>> Just because there seems to be an orgy of people agreeing that >>> Tabs are the One True Way, I feel a need to point out that there >>> are those of us who fervently believe that Tabs Are Evil. The >>> reason is that tabs are interpreted differently in different >>> places, and they're indistinguishable from spaces upon casual >>> inspection. So the visual appearance of mixed spaces and tabs can >>> be highly misleading and confusing, especially in an environment >>> with multiple developers, each of whom may have a different tab >>> setting. >>> >>> Spaces are unambiguous. As it's the meaning of the source that >>> matters, and editors can be tuned to personal taste, I'm in favor >>> of leaving the source clean of tabs and letting people tweak their >>> editors to their own liking. >>> >>> In my view, Python should consider leading tabs to be a syntax >>> error (and yes, I know about the -tt switch). >> >> I'm not sure what you are talking about, but I meant that Tabs can be >> set in an editor (e.g. BBEdit) to _display_ at any number of spaces, >> but the editor does not put in real spaces. It just displays the Tabs >> as indentations whose width you choose. There's still only one >> character (a tab) there in the file. Delete works properly. That's >> pretty unambiguous to me. So if someone else on your project likes to >> display using 8-space tabs and you like 2-space tabs it doesn't >> matter. >> You can look at his files and edit them back and forth and nothing >> gets > > confused. Why is that so bad? >
Because in a mixed environment some one will take a file that has tabs and add spaces or vice versa. As soon as lines have a mixture of tabs and spaces then the display does ugly things when you change editors. I run into this all the time in C with those I develop with. We try to keep it to spaces but some people forget that their editor puts in a tab automatically for 8 spaces and then spaces after that to column 12 for example. Then my editor which sets tabs to 4 spaces has indentation all messed up. -- *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- Rob Managan email managan at llnl.gov LLNL phone: 925-423-0903 P.O. Box 808, L-095 FAX: 925-422-3389 Livermore, CA 94551-0808 _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
