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@macports.org http://www.tildesoft.com