On Wed, 29 May 2002 jon@siliconcircus.com wrote:
On Wed, 29 May 2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
There no need to agree -- tabs are 8 spaces by definition. It's standard.
There's no need to agree because everyone should be using hard tabs (ASCII 9, \t, whatever you want to call it). Every editor on the face of the planet knows how to make these appear as however many spaces the user wants. So I can see the code with indentation size 8, and you can see it with 4, or 2, or 160, or whatever.
After the first non-whitespace character on a line, spaces should be used, since at that point, different numbers of hard tabs would be needed to get text on succeeding lines to be at the same column.
Since I've never contributed to Wine, I'm perfectly happy if everyone ignores my opinion on this, but I felt the need to combat the insanity of using spaces for indentation :-)
Absolutely. If you use \t, then anyone looking at the code can choose the size of indents. I *despise* space-based indenting, almost as much as I despise mixed indenting (eg. 4-space indenting with every pair of 4-space indents being converted into a single tab).
As you point out, a good discipline on the use of tabs does pretty much cater to everyone's tastes. However you can't assume that using spaces after the first non-whitespace character will ensure arbitrary column alignment (eg. for end-of-line comments). At least not between lines that have differing indentation.
Cheers, Geoff