Re: On Tabs and Spaces

On Oct 17, 2007, at 2:09 AM, Michael Witten wrote:

On 17 Oct 2007, at 3:17:08 AM, Luke Lu wrote:

quoted

But I still haven't seen any compelling arguments against the "all  
space" case

Overhead!

If you use 8 spaces instead of one tab,
that's using up 7x more space!

Consider:

    # calculates the extra space required to
    # use the given number of spaces/tab.
    size()
    {
        count=`grep -RIo "\`printf \"\t\"\`" . | wc -l`;
        perl -e "print $count*$(($1-1))/1024/1024 . \" MB\n\"";
    }

    Then in in a git working tree:

        size 8; # 1.28701210021973 MB
        size 4; # 0.551576614379883 MB

First, the overhead is not a simple x4 or x8 conversion in size, but  
it's the upper bound. Given that, let's look at the percentage of the  
overhead: my git working tree is 56MB after gc, so the overhead is  
2.3% max for size 8 and 0.98% for size 4. That's not significant at all.

    In a linux kernel working tree:

        size 8; # 61.4902725219727 MB
        size 4; # 26.3529739379883 MB

Conclusion:

    Yikes!

Now, compile the kernel, do a du in the tree and report back  
percentages of the overhead.

Disk is cheap (1GB costs less than half a dollar), people's  
productivity/time is not. The overhead argument is compelling, not!

__Luke