On 02/24/2012 08:25 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Mark Lawrence<breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Oo, thou sinner, fancy violating PEP 8 and standardising on tabs.
PEP 8 applies only to Python code, our standard is across all our
languages :) But yes, I'm a horrible sinner and I like tabs. They
separate the display (do you want tabs to show as four-space indent,
two-centimeter indent, or fifty-pixel indent?) from the structure
(this line is indented two levels). Spaces merge those.
ChrisA
If tabs were ever implemented consistently and reasonably in both an
editor and a matching language, then I'd consider leaving tabs in the
file. But to me, they're just a crude way to compress the file, and the
space they save is no longer worth the pain they cause (I came to this
conclusion 30 years ago, and have re-evaluated it dozens of times as new
editors and new languages changed the rules. At that time, I had one of
my developers write an editor (shipped with our MSDOS system, instead of
Edlin) that implemented it.)
Some time when i have a lot more time, I'll state one of (many possible)
the ways that tabs could be made acceptable in a limited environment.
Almost 40 years ago, I wrote an editor and assembler whose file format
used a separation character between fields. I used A0 because our
screens at the time ignored the high bit, so a file was sort-of readable
right out of the box. And the way that the developer jumped between
fields was the semi-colon key, of course, since that's the position of
the skip key in the keypunch we were replacing.
However, I don't intend to foist my opinions on others, just to state
them as opinions. At the office, we use special comment fields at
end-of-file to tell Emacs how to deal with a mixture of tabs and
spaces. Code written by a dozen people over a dozen years, and nobody
wanted to enforce a conversion to something common.
--
DaveA
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