🚀 go-pugleaf

In comp.lang.java.advocacy, Dale King
<KingD@TCE.com>
 wrote
on Mon, 22 Jul 2002 16:10:15 -0500
<3d3c79d7@news.tce.com>:
> "Chad Myers" <cmyers@N0.S.P4.M.austin.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:fJY_8.160787$eF5.4247098@twister.austin.rr.com...
>>
>> "Dale King" <KingD@TCE.com> wrote in message news:3d3c4db4@news.tce.com...
>> > "Jezuch" <jezuch@interia.pl> wrote in message
>> > news:rs5bjuok6d7urbm0kl3pti3q18mknvsaur@4ax.com...
>> > > Pewnego, oczywiscie beznadziejnego dnia 16 Jul 2002 15:08:54 -0700,
>> > > ryan_breidenbach@hotmail.com (Ryan Breidenbach) wykrztusil(a):
>> > >
>> > > >Tabs suck. Peroid.
>> > >
>> > > Spaces suck. Period.
>> >
>> >
>> > Spaces 100% portable.
>>
>> Not so. Depending on the font you're using, spaces can look attrocious.
> 
> In what way can a space look attrocious? It is blank space. I suppose you
> could have a font that gave you two inches of blank space for every space,
> but that is hardly a portability issue.

No, it just makes things look *extremely* ugly.  Of course, the
reverse is true in fonts such as Helvetica; the spaces are
extremely narrow (I think they're the same width as the 'l'
character) which means that someone is bound to overuse them;
if the file is subsequently viewed in a font such as Courier, where
all the characters are the same width, the words might end up way
out                                                        here! :-)

I don't know if Times Roman has a similar problem, though I suspect
that it does.

Of course, the compiler doesn't care, unless they're in "", which
did happen once, and in a rather critical spot, too; Microsoft
generated an extra space in the response to a CONNECT attempt through
a transparent SSL proxy , resulting in

200 <space> <space> OK

and Java, prior to 1.4.0, was being overly pedantic, resulting
in a malfunction.  Fortunately, I think that bug has now been
fixed (although one has to upgrade to a new version of MS Proxy to
get the fix), but I strongly suspect that someone coded

"200 <space> <space> OK"

by mistake because they were using Helvetica because it looked nice
during software editing.  :-)

> 
>> > Tabs, rarely portable.
>>
>> Portable to all modern editors, but not vi or emacs and a handful of
>> others. This is the crux. All the stalwarts refuse to enter the modern
>> age and expect everyone else to come down to their level.
> 
> Sure all modern editors support them, but how deep?
> Do I really want to tweak my editor for every file I load?
> There are plenty of tools that do not handle tabs. I know of
> none that do not handle spaces.

I've had little trouble with tabs in VI, but there was one editor
way back which de facto converted tabs to spaces (actually, it
moved the cursor); it was the Display manager on old Apollo
DOMAIN machines.

JBuilder also has some slightly oddball quirks in that department.
I've tweaked the settings in JB4 to use 8 spaces for tabs, and
it seems to work, but I don't know how well.

[.sigsnip]

-- 
#191, ewill3@earthlink.net
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