On Nov 15, 2006, at 7:47, Sebastian Reid wrote:
Which good reason is this? Are they dramatically more memory
intensive?
They’re dramatically good at breaking formatting, is what they are.
It seems to me that tabs would make more sense, since they would
allow the reader to set their chosen length of indentation in the
editor. That way it’s two spaces to you, four to someone else,
with it defaulting to the language custom.
If people could be relied upon to set their tabs correctly, you’d be
right. In reality, there’s always someone who wants two-space
indentation, but has four-space tabs, which gives this horrible
mixture of tabs and spaces. What would one tab + two spaces look
like if you opened the file without knowing your co-workers preference?
Of course, it’s usually not all that bad to correct, but since using
spaces doesn’t allow for the same kind of error, why waste even that
small amount of time with the dreaded \t?
In any case hitting tab is far too much of a habit to break,
whether that uses real tabs or fills in a number of actual spaces.
What if you were trying to line up to a four-level nested line on a
4-space indented language? Are you going to hit space 16 times?
No, I’m going to hit ‘tab’ once and let emacs figure out how many
spaces to insert. I’m pretty sure any useful editor would have a
similar method, and if your favourite editor doesn’t at least have a
‘use spaces for tabs’ option that lets you use the tab key to insert
spaces up to the next tab stop, well, you should probably pick a new
favourite.
m.s.
