🚀 go-pugleaf

"Chad Myers" <cmyers@N0.S.P4.M.austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:Ns%_8.161160$eF5.4268956@twister.austin.rr.com...
>
> "Dale King" <KingD@TCE.com> wrote in message news:3d3c79d7@news.tce.com...
> > "Chad Myers" <cmyers@N0.S.P4.M.austin.rr.com> wrote in message
> > news:fJY_8.160787$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.
>
> Believe it or not, there are some people who use proportional-width fonts
> for development, and spacing screws that all up. Hardly any of the indents
> match up.

How is that possible? Indents are some quantity of spaces from the left
margin. n spaces takes the same amount space on any line. It makes no
difference what type of font you use.

I believe what you are talking about is not indents but alignment within
statements such as aligning the variable names in a series of declarations
or trying to allign trailing comments. That is not indenting. Both of these
are bad practices and not solved by using tabs either.

> With tabs, they do.

If and only if you are viewing with the same font and tab settings as the
original person. Change either of these and you have a mess. Once again, the
tabs are not portable.

> > > > 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.
>
> Really? Like what?
>
> And, I'm talking about modern stuff, Java, C#, maybe C++, not ancient
> C stuff.

The issue with tab settings shows up any time I open the Java API source
code which is formatted with 8 character tabs and spaces. It is only
viewable with tabs set to 8.

I never could find a decent difference tool that handled tabs and gave good
on screen differences and good difference printouts. And believe me I have
gone through many difference tools. The one I settled on because it did
understandable difference printouts for reviews, did not handle tabs. It
printed a box for tabs. And unfortunately the code would have tabs on some
lines and spaces on others (or even a mixture on the same line) due to being
edited by different people. It made code reviews very fun with randomly
indented code.

I have seen compilers when outputting errors that like to put a carat on the
line underneath it to point to the error. It did not work well for lines
with tabs as the console where you saw the errors used different tab
settings than the editor.

The key point I was making is that you have to think about the fact that
there are more tools to think about than just the editor. Not every tool has
the same level of support as your editor.

--
  Dale King