Björn Lindström wrote: > Ed Leafe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > >>Again, specifics would be welcome. I've been using tabs for >>indentation for over a decade, and have not once run into the horror >>stories that everyone who hates tabs says will happen, but who never >>give specifics as to how they cause "problems". > > > This article should explain it: > > http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html
Not even *close* to explaining it. The author doesn't mention a single problem that happens because of using tabs. He doesn't even try to explain what Bad Things could happen. He just *assumes* that Tabs Are Bad, M'kay. He says: "My opinion is that the best way to solve the technical issues is to mandate that the ASCII #9 TAB character never appear in disk files" How nice. And his option is worth the photons I read them by why? It is possible that Jamie Zawinski has the best, most logical, inarguable reasons for his opinion. But we mere mortals will never know what those reasons are from his essay, because he doesn't tell us. He also says: "I just care that two people editing the same file use the same interpretations" which is fair enough "and that it's possible to look at a file and know what interpretation of the TAB character was used, because otherwise it's just impossible to read." "Impossible to read" hey? That wouldn't be just a teeny tiny overstatement, perhaps? Out of curiosity, finding a line of text indented with spaces (say, " "), how do you know whether that is meant to be a single 8-space indent, two 4-space indents, or even eight 1-space indents? Perhaps if it is a Python program you might be able to infer correct indentation from the program structure, but in an arbitrary free-form text file... well, perhaps all text files with indents are "impossible to read". It seems to me that "one tab per indent level" is far more logical than "some arbitrary number, N, of spaces, often a multiple of eight, or four, or two, per indent level, and hope that the number of spaces is a multiple of that arbitrary N". But maybe that's just me. He also describes tabs characters being used "for compression". That's a strange argument -- it *assumes* that the "real" indent is N spaces, and that an ASCII 9 tab is some sort of faux replacement. Is it not just as likely that tabs are the real deal, and N spaces is some sort of tab expansion? Of course, having told the reader that ASCII 9 characters should be prohibited from text files, it makes the author's original disclaimer "I'm trying to avoid espousing my personal religion here" rather amusing. For the record, I started using tabs, shifted to using spaces because it was "recommended", got frustrated with having to hit multiple key presses to indent and deindent (I use lots of different editors, ranging from kwrite to gedit to nano and even, may Wodan help me, Windows Notepad -- not only do some editors *not* allow auto conversion of tabs, but the ones that do are annoyingly inconsistant in how -- and whether -- they work), went back to tabs, got frustrated with people complaining that indentation was being mangled by various webmail and News clients (I never saw it myself, mind), and went back to spaces again. I'm now feeling sufficiently frustrated that I'm seriously thinking of changing back to tabs, and people using brain-dead News readers can change their client instead of telling me to change my editor. I'm almost fired up enough about this to start the Society For The Treatment Of Tabs As First Class Characters. *wink* -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
