On 10 Jul, 2007, at 18:15, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
This is also a reason why using spaces everywhere, even for line indentation, is bad IMHO: it forces your personal line indentation preference on everyone else.
Or forces everyone else's on you. For example, I like 2-wide soft tabs. But since many others seem not to, I have put my personal preferences aside and write with 4-wide for MacPorts. That's a good thing; there's more value in consistency than in getting my way.
Or use spaces everywhere. Just as long as it is consistent ?
I'd prefer not to use spaces everywhere, because I like using the tab key and other indentation functions of my editor, which uses the tab character. I do not wish to reconfigure my editor to use space characters because I use tab characters in all the other non- MacPorts text files that I edit with my editor.
That can still be problematic. I write code with the assumption that it will be edited and viewed on a 80-char-wide terminal. That means that, if I were to use 2-wide hard tabs, lots of lines could start wrapping in places they shouldn't for others' settings. Aside from that, the argument "we should use hard tabs to avoid enforcing personal indentation preferences on others" is fallacious, because many people (such as me) prefer soft tabs :) Basically, I would rather a standard width were dictated from "on high" than it be left to users. I don't care what it is (and it probably won't be what I'd like) so long as the Portfile looks the same to me as to everyone else. Chris