On Mon, 20 Mar 2017 01:27 am, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2017-03-18, Nathan Ernst <nathan.er...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> As I said earlier, where tabs are superior in that most code focused >> editors (at least those worth using) allow you to adjust the width of the >> tab. > > What about all other other text tools that _aren't_ 'code focused > editors'? (e.g. grep, less, cat, awk, sed, a2ps, asciidoc, etc.)
I wonder whether the tabs versus spaces divide is closely aligned to the Windows versus Unix/Linux divide? It seems to me that Unix users are typically going to be using Unix tools which often assume spaces are used for indentation, and consequently cope badly with tabs. I maintain that makes them "broken" tools, but broken or not, that's the status quo and Unix users will simply deal with it by using spaces for indents. On the other hand, the typical Windows developer probably has little or no access to grep, less, sed, etc, and consequently doesn't fear using tabs in source code. Since nothing is going to touch it apart from either Notepad or the IDE, there's no problem with using tabs. Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and I had a Macintosh (classic OS, not OS X) it was normal to use tabs for indents. Likewise when I had a Windows machine. It was only when I moved to Linux that I had "tabs are bad, m'kay?" beaten into me, with the main justification being "tabs will break your tools". I'm not even sure that it is true that tabs will break the Unix toolset. But Unix users mostly *believe* it is true. -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
