"Dimitrie O. Paun" dpaun@rogers.com writes:
On the other hand, what's the big deal with mixing tabs and spaces? What's the big loss as compared to only spaces? This is just trying to impose (silly) policy on people. As long as we stick to the standard meaning of tab (which is 8, there's no question about it. What do you get when you send a file to the printer? Or open it in a non-customized editor?), there is no need whatsoever to force people into this or that way. And this without a loss for anyone!
There are two problems with tabs: one is that no matter how much we agree that the tab size is 8, some people do change their editor settings and that messes up the code; the other is that it makes diffs harder to read because things don't line up properly due to the extra char in the first column. It's much better to only use spaces (but I'm of course not going to try to enforce that).