Spacing issues

[Kevin Ballard]

On Feb 9, 2007, at 12:01 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> Is there any reason why we shouldn't
>
> - have tabs at the beginnings of lines to provide indentation
> - use spaces within a line when we want to do something like align  
> columns
>
> That would seem the most logical solution to me.

Because different editors use different widths for tabs. And people  
who use editors that don't visually show tabs may not realize that  
it's tabs and not spaces (I assume that's why there are plenty of  
lines that start with a few tabs and then have 4 spaces after that).

> Using only spaces seems not so good to me, because
>
> - spaces uses 2 or 4 times as much disk space as a tab

Do you honestly believe this is a problem? I'm sure I can spare the  
few extra kB it might take.

> - spaces need 2 or 4 times as many presses on the delete key as a  
> tab to remove in my editor

Then you need a better editor. Any modern editor should know how soft  
tabs work and allow you to delete them just like tabs. What editor  
are you using?

> - I can't use my editor's tab width setting to see the amount of  
> indentation I want to see

Is this ever actually a problem? lines should not be indented so much  
that 4-width soft tabs cause it to go off the end of the line. And  
besides, given the current state of indentation (mixture of tabs and  
spaces), this isn't viable with current source.

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
eridius at macports.org
http://www.tildesoft.com


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