Your tabstop must be 8, or you're just asking for trouble.

I use a two-space indent, but four also seems reasonable; I find that eight is overkill. You should standardize this within your team or project, or if you're contributing to someone else's code, use their value.

Conversion of tabs to spaces or vice-versa is optional. I'd let this vary, even from file to file or within a file, since people use different editors and typing styles, and the indents can be easily converted back and forth automatically as long as you stick with the standard tabstop.

(I use Apple's "TextEdit" editor, which lets you set the number of spaces to be used for the line/block indent commands, and which automatically converts leading runs of spaces to tabs.)

In reply to Re: The classical TAB issue by simonm
in thread The classical TAB issue by Lorand

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.