Re: On Tabs and Spaces

* Wed 2007-10-17 Michael Witten [off-list ref]
* Message-Id: E29971BA-7306-4570-8383-26D0C9C0B814@mit.edu

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!

Software is the right place to worry about optimization. We should trust
SCM to make proper and efficient deltas. If not, algorithms need
improvemnts.

Any cross platform development or electronic exchange is guaranteed to
be interpreted correctly when policy enforces "only spaces"

As we have already seen in numerous times in this thread, using tabs
will - eventually - be interpreted in some editor, in some display, in
some encironment using some tools ... incorrectly or different than the
author intended. Simply because editors are configurable and we cannot
know what settings they may have when they load the file in.

There is no such problem with spaces. 

The storage constraints are insignificant given the disk space vs. cost;
including possibly used compression algorithms in storage or transfers.

Jari

-- 
Welcome to FOSS revolution: we fix and modify until it shines