Re: On Tabs and Spaces

Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

quoted

Luke Lu [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

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).

But sequences of 16 spaces are unlikely to land on 16-byte boundaries 
all the time in the file so adjacent data to those 16-space blocks will 
still provide good hashing.

Half of the three-tab equivalents and all of the four-tab equivalents
contain a 16-byte space sequence on the tested boundary.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum