in reply to Re: The classical TAB issue
in thread The classical TAB issue

In my entire life, no matter how much people may disagree on how many spaces to use for each indent level, I have never heard anyone offer a compelling reason to use TABs to indent source code.

Smaller size? For example: 

$ unexpand < bbbike | wc -c
 488645
$ expand < bbbike | wc -c
 605458

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Re: Re: Re: The classical TAB issue
by hardburn (Abbot) on Apr 07, 2004 at 13:31 UTC

    When you can buy a 500 GB hard drive, size is not a good reason to use tabs.

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    Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

[reply]
[d/l]
      My iPAQ still has only 64MB RAM and 16MB Flash. And my mobile phone just only 4MB RAM.
[reply]

        Do you write programs for either of those? If you do, do you use a langauge that would be compiled (either to machine code or to bytecode that is stored in a seperate file)? In either case, using tabs vs. spaces is still irrelevent from a file size point of view.

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        : () { :|:& };:

        Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

[reply]
[d/l]

        I was refering to code you are editing -- if you then want to install/run that code on a device where size is important, then there's all sorts of things you can do to help save bytes, even in an interpreted language. space->tabs may save some space, but converting all insignificant whitespace into single spaces is even better, and converting variable names to single characters can save a tone more.

        Of course, if you're acctually editing source code on your iPod and Cell-Phone, then my point is void, and I weep for you.

[reply]

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