🚀 go-pugleaf

"Tim Tyler" <tim@tt1.org> wrote in message news:H00310.Kr9@bath.ac.uk...
> In comp.lang.java.advocacy Ryan Breidenbach <ryan_breidenbach@hotmail.com>
wrote:
>
> : This entire point was brought up my somebody who (I believe) claimed
> : that non-proportional fonts were as antiquated as mechincal
> : typewriters and served no purpose. I completely disagree. I don't see
> : how you can view code so that it is aligned clearly in anything but a
> : non-proportional font. Am I mistaken?
>
> Oh no - not at all.  Monospacing is essential when writing code.
>
> Of course it's also true that monospacing is not good aesthetically -
> for the reader - and it is not used much outside this domain for good
> reason.

Proportional fonts opens up a host of problems for alignment. A previous
poster claimed that a good tab implementation solved this, which is false.
I'm sure we all have the experience of doing something like changing a font
in a word processor which caused the text we aligned with tabs to move.

> : Also, the other part of this whole topic was the tabs vs. spaces
> : thing. It has been stated repeatedly that spaces are represented
> : consistently across all tools - they represent ONE SPACE. Tabs,
> : however, are interpreted differently. Some tools show eight spaces.
> : Some four. Some show a box. Some show some other weird character. Yada
> : yada yada. What it all boils down to is this - if tabs are not
> : represented consistently universally, why use them over spaces? I have
> : yet to hear a reasonable answer.
>
> My answer fot having them *in the editor* is that they are the easiest way
> to facilitate outdenting.

Any modern code editor will allow you to select a section of code and
out-dent it. Rarely will you outdent by manually deleting the characters as
there is almost always more than one line to outdent.

> I don't think there's any reason for having them in the repository.
> In fact I agree that that's a recipe for disaster.

Would that be because they were not portable?

--
  Dale King