in reply to The classical TAB issue

I must be the only person around who used to use 3 spaces for indentation. (Now I use 4)

Why 3? Well, FORTRAN (my mother tongue) has only columns 7->72 to work with. With only 66 columns to work with, 4 spaces consumed to much too soon, and 2 spaces was harder to read, especially on print-outs (no colour coding in the good 'ole days, no full-screen editor, ... cards...) Also, continuations aren't always easy to read.

What I truly want to know, do people ident their comments? I've seen both in C and in Perl.

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Re: Re: The classical TAB issue
by parv (Parson) on Apr 07, 2004 at 04:33 UTC

    I use spaces as the only character for indentation; personally i cannot handle changes in tab width of a foreign editor. I use 2-space indentation; 4 is too much (as in first character being too far away to move the cursor to from the previous line). I tried 3-spaces once or twice; i (think i) prefer even number of spaces.

    I sure do indent my comments, same as rest of the code. Unindented comments, for indented part of the code, indicate some sort of specialness to me: a bug, pay extra attention, most important thing, and such.

    To OP, as it has been repeated, be consistent in your own code; try to conform for the good of the project while working w/ others. (I personally would try at least once to push for using only the spaces, not tabs, for indentation; difference in indentation level & position of braces are much easier to tolerate.)

    - Parv
      I use 2-space indentation; 4 is too much (as in first character being too far away to move the cursor to from the previous line).
      Then get your editor to do it. The majority of the indents happen after a line whose last character is a '{' or a ':', and almost always if such a character is the last character of the previous line, you want an extra level of indentation. In my vi-clone, if 'perl' or 'C' mode is turned on, ending a line with a '{' or a ':' causes an extra level of indentation to happen. Starting a new line with ^D removes a level of indentation. Hitting <TAB> inserts the right amount of spaces to get to the next tab stop. '>>' adds an extra level of indentation to the current line, '<<' removes it. I rarely have to type 4 spaces to do indentation.

      Abigail

Re: The classical TAB issue
by GaryG (Novice) on Apr 12, 2004 at 14:46 UTC
    If long, I place my comments on the line above the code it
    describes && indent to the same level as the code itself.

    If short, it goes after the code on that line.