Oh God, I agree with Xah Lee. Someone take me out behind the chemical sheds...
Iain Xah Lee wrote: > Tabs versus Spaces in Source Code > > Xah Lee, 2006-05-13 > > In coding a computer program, there's often the choices of tabs or > spaces for code indentation. There is a large amount of confusion about > which is better. It has become what's known as “religious war” — > a heated fight over trivia. In this essay, i like to explain what is > the situation behind it, and which is proper. > > Simply put, tabs is proper, and spaces are improper. Why? This may seem > ridiculously simple given the de facto ball of confusion: the semantics > of tabs is what indenting is about, while, using spaces to align code > is a hack. > > Now, tech geekers may object this simple conclusion because they itch > to drivel about different editors and so on. The alleged problem > created by tabs as seen by the industry coders are caused by two > things: (1) tech geeker's sloppiness and lack of critical thinking > which lead them to not understanding the semantic purposes of tab and > space characters. (2) Due to the first reason, they have created and > propagated a massive none-understanding and mis-use, to the degree that > many tools (e.g. vi) does not deal with tabs well and using spaces to > align code has become widely practiced, so that in the end spaces seem > to be actually better by popularity and seeming simplicity. > > In short, this is a phenomenon of misunderstanding begetting a snowball > of misunderstanding, such that it created a cultural milieu to embrace > this malpractice and kick what is true or proper. Situations like this > happens a lot in unix. For one non-unix example, is the file name's > suffix known as “extension”, where the code of file's type became > part of the file name. (e.g. “.txt”, “.html”, “.jpg”). > Another well-known example is HTML practices in the industry, where > badly designed tags from corporation's competitive greed, and stupid > coding and misunderstanding by coders and their tools are so > wide-spread such that they force the correct way to the side by the > eventual standardization caused by sheer quantity of inproper but set > practice. > > Now, tech geekers may still object, that using tabs requires the > editors to set their positions, and plain files don't carry that > information. This is a good question, and the solution is to advance > the sciences such that your source code in some way embed such > information. This would be progress. However, this is never thought of > because the “unix philosophies” already conditioned people to hack > and be shallow. In this case, many will simply use the character > intended to separate words for the purpose of indentation or alignment, > and spread the practice with militant drivels. > > Now, given the already messed up situation of the tabs vs spaces by the > unixers and unix brain-washing of the coders in the industry... Which > should we use today? I do not have a good proposition, other than just > use whichever that works for you but put more critical thinking into > things to prevent mishaps like this. > > Tabs vs Spaces can be thought of as parameters vs hard-coded values, or > HTML vs ascii format, or XML/CSS vs HTML 4, or structural vs visual, or > semantic vs format. In these, it is always easy to convert from the > former to the latter, but near impossible from the latter to the > former. And, that is because the former encodes information that is > lost in the latter. If we look at the issue of tabs vs spaces, indeed, > it is easy to convert tabs to spaces in a source code, but more > difficult to convert from spaces to tabs. Because, tabs as indentation > actually contains the semantic information about indentation. With > spaces, this critical information is lost in space. > > This issue is intimately related to another issue in source code: > soft-wrapped lines versus physical, hard-wrapped lines by EOL (end of > line character). This issue has far more consequences than tabs vs > spaces, and the unixer's unthinking has made far-reaching damages in > the computing industry. Due to unix's EOL ways of thinking, it has > created languages based on EOL (just about ALL languages except the > Lisp family and Mathematica) and tools based on EOL (cvs, diff, grep, > and basically every tool in unix), thoughts based on EOL (software > value estimation by counting EOL, hard-coded email quoting system by > “>” prefix, and silent line-truncations in many unix tools), such > that any progress or development towards a “algorithmic code unit” > concept or language syntaxes are suppressed. I have not written a full > account on this issue, but i've touched it in this essay: “The Harm > of hard-wrapping Lines”, at > http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/hard-wrap.html > ---- > This post is archived at: > http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/tabs_vs_spaces.html > > Xah > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ∑ http://xahlee.org/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
