Re: [boost] Re: Re: Tabs creep back into source files

From: Terje Slettebø (tslettebo_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-09-09 18:50:05

>From: "David B. Held" <dheld_at_[hidden]>

> "Terje Slettebø" <tslettebo_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
> news:020e01c2584e$01151f10$60fb5dd5_at_pc...
> > [...]
> > > You also have to forbid leading spaces after tabs (for instance, to
> indent
> > > a partial tab...6 spaces, on a 4-space tab).
> >
> > No, that's ok, as long as the space is used for alignment, not to denote
> > indentation level.
>
> That's a maintenance nightmare.
>
> > [...]
> > Here's a solution ("*" = space):
> >
> > class foo
> > {
> > <tab>*************foo() { }
> > <tab>void********bar() { }
> > };
> > [...]
>
> Maybe I'm not a perfect coder, but during the course of editing code,
> I break lines in the middle and re-indent them, combine lines, and all
> other manner of combination.

I understand your point. Also, as Shannon Barber (who uses tabs and spaces)
pointed out in a mail, editors typically don't know about this way of doing
things, so if you are at a line and press enter, it will fill as many tabs
as it can, and the rest with spaces, if auto-indentation is used. Thus, you
may have to manually replace those tabs with spaces.

> It would be a major PITA to have to go
> and recheck every line to make sure it had the proper combination of
> leading tabs and spaces.

As has been pointed out in this thread, there are consequences for both ways
of doing things. I've just done a 100+ files project converted from using
spaces, to using tabs and spaces. I used "tabify" for each file, then
changed tab size, so any alignment showed up, as it became wrong, and fixed
that, by converting it to spaces. I only needed to do that a handful of
places. So for me, this was not a problem. The advantage is now that
everybody can use their preferred tab size for it.

For you, as you say, depending on how the code is, it might be a PITA to use
this convention, as it would mean a lot of checking and fixing. For others,
like my project, that isn't the case.

Regards,

Terje