Re: No Hard Tabs in Code

Use spaces because everything else is worse unless used with extreme caution, not because spaces are awesome. Perfectly tab-formatted code, in an environment where you know the tab stops will be the same for everyone, is probably the best case--but the instant someone grabs a code snippet and tosses it in an email message (5-space tabs...the horror!) or changes their settings, all that effort to line things up is not only for naught, it's actively harmful to reading the code.

It's not that spaces are better, it's that they're least awful when awfulness happens (and it will.) Other people have to read your code, if you're at all serious about programming, and it's not excusable, nor effective to demand they conform to your tab stops. So don't use them.

Comment on Re: No Hard Tabs in Code

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Re^2: No Hard Tabs in Code by Tux (Canon) on Jul 01, 2010 at 16:09 UTC
Someone setting a (e-mail) tab to 5 spaces is asking for horror. They deserve horror. IMHO anyone setting a TAB to something other than 8 spaces should not send patches or be able to commit to a central repo. I have no strong feelings for tab vs spaces. As long as they are used consistently within the team (teams are huge for open source projects), it is fine with me. I much more care about indentation. Specifically with people that use cut-n-paste from other files and do not adjust it for the current file. Oh horror! Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn	[reply]
Re^3: No Hard Tabs in Code by ssandv (Hermit) on Jul 01, 2010 at 16:19 UTC
8 spaces is a ridiculous waste of real estate, to me. It's far too much for a single layer of indentation, and I find it _harder and slower to read_. On the other hand, if you mandate tabs, and tab stops are smaller than the most extreme person prefers them to be, you get the ultimate disaster of mixed tabs and spaces--which is yet another good reason to turn everything into spaces. A 5-space first tab, for paragraph indentation, was the standard for fixed width text for a very long time until not all that long ago. How quickly we forget.	[reply]
Re^4: No Hard Tabs in Code by alexbio (Monk) on Jul 02, 2010 at 17:22 UTC
[...] In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added benefit of warning you when you're nesting your functions too deep. [...] Taken from Linux documentation (Doc*/CodingStyle) Chapter 1. I think this explains very well the idea behind the 8-chars tabs "movement". There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3. (The second quotation was just for fun :D) Alex's Log - http://alexlog.co.cc	[reply]


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