🚀 go-pugleaf

Chad Myers wrote:

> Tabs are preferable because the viewer can configure them to
> his liking, whereas with spaces, you're stuck.

Many professionals believe that spaces only is the better way.


> Tabs should be treated as tabs. If they aren't, then the editor
> is broken.

Yes...

But what is a tab? That is, where are your tab stops? Every 8?, every 4?
every 2? every 3? First one at column 16, next one at column 20...?

Most text editors will default to 8 space tabstops. However, quantitative
studies have shown that 8 spaces is sub-optimal for program source-code. And
in much of the source code out there, tabs and spaces are often mixed. And
this is rampant among DevStudio users despite having a "show whitespace" menu
item and key shortcut. Just go through a large software developer and see how
many different ways the programmers have their tabs set.

Try them out (the show whitespace option). Check a lot of production code.
See if every single source file has only tabs and no spaces used. Often
spaces will sneak in when breaking long lines. If you're in a shop that has
"tabs ONLY" as a hard rule, then more power to you. Otherwise there are many
issues to consider.

And also what you are working on can be important. If you're doing standard
makefiles, you'll need to start with tabs, not spaces. And with assemblers
and other languages, whitespace matters (Python and FORTRAN among those).


Here's one page to start with
http://adamspiers.org/computing/why_no_tabs.html
But if you want to get into this topic, you should probably search then start
a thread over on comp.software-eng

--
Jon A. Cruz

What's this? It's almost as though the fates were tempting me to...
Bad fates. Baaad... Naughty fates...