Re: On Tabs and Spaces

Andreas Ericsson [off-list ref] writes:

Jari Aalto wrote:

quoted

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

quoted

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.

And simply because nearly all (unix) editors still insert a hard tab
when pressing the tab key, and *mixing* tabs and spaces makes the
situation *really* unbearable, one really shouldn't use all spaces.

I guess that means that you consider emacs to be an obscure or
non-unix editor?

When you press TAB while editing program code in emacs it doesn't
insert a hard tab. It reindents the current line according to the
indentation rules. The whitespace at the beginning of the line is
filled with spaces and/or tabs, depending on the indent-tabs-mode
setting.

-- 
David Kågedal