Re: On Tabs and Spaces

Luke Lu [off-list ref] writes:

But I still haven't seen any compelling arguments against the "all
space" case, other than "people will screw it up into mixed spaces",
which is really a straw man, as many multi-platform projects
enforced the all-space policy easily by using a pre-commit hook in
maintainers' repository.

All-space indentation renders the binary delta algorithm git uses for
compression of packs slow and partly inoperative (all sequences of 16
spaces share the same finger print, and the number of identical finger
prints for which the file information is kept is reduced to 64).

The only downside of all-space is a moderate space bloat in source,
which is insignificant, all things considered.

It will also slow down git's packing and make it produce worse
results.

I agree that "8-character tabs are the gold standard", only for the
tabstop==8 part but not the indent==tab part. For me the question
is: is it really so unreasonable to just say "all-space is the holy
grail"?

Yes.

-- 
David Kastrup