On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > As I understand it, Unix coders tend to prefer spaces, and Windows users > tend to be more comfortable with tabs. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, > you'll find plenty of exceptions, but it seems to me that Unix tools are > unforgiving of tabs while Windows IDEs tend to default to tabs. I'm not a > Windows person myself, any Windows guys like to comment?
I've worked both platforms extensively, and it's not really as clear-cut as that. Most Unix tools are perfectly happy with tabs, *as long as you let them mean eight spaces*; a lot, but not all, have an option to configure tab width, but you have to specify it to every program separately. On the flip side, tab configurability can be a huge feature. There've been times when I've looked at something with the tab width set to something insane like 7 or 9 (no, folks, I did not say "7 of 9") to highlight a display bug or other oddity. Not often, but it has its uses - and you can't do that if there are actual spaces involved. Anyone who's using a broken editor should fix it or switch editors. That's easy. And if you really love your editor, sometimes you can fix the issue outside it - maybe in a source control hook. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
