Horizontal alignment is only a relative concept,
not absolute. The indendentation width is easier adjusted as a per-user setting
when using tabs, where as it is inflexible when spaces are embedded as a an
attempt to communicate the indentation. It is like trying to manually center
text vs letting the word processor calculate the text's placement.
Spaces are lowlevel, tabs are
highlevel.
There just needs to be a standard of 1 tab per
indentation, not two. If you like your indentation to be further, use a wider
tab. It is no different then specifying 3 spaces for indendation vs 4 or 8. The
unit of indentation is all that needs to be consistent, not the method of
implementing it.
"
*
Developer A of library has tabs set for 4.
* Developer B commits trivial fix.
Developer B's editor had tabs set at 2,
but converted tabs on the changed
line only to spaces.
It resulted in messed up source
files."
If developer B uses tabs of 2, I can't possibly
see how it is messed up. They purposely want their tabs at 2. "Messed up" is
highly subjective. If the standard is to use tabs, then obviously, the standard
must be that the tabs remain in the files, and editors that translate them are
not allowed.
----- Original Message -----
Newsgroups:
gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel
Sent: Monday, 2002:September:09
12:01
Subject: Re: Tabs creep back into source
files
From: "Terje Slettebų" <tslettebo@chello.no>
> How
does this apply to tabs? More or less all editors have support
for
tabs,
> and for setting the tab size. Do you mean to say that
because some may
use
> Notepad to write programs, others won't be
able to benefit from using the
> tab size they prefer?
No, I'm
saying that just as with variable-pitch fonts, when source code is
written
using tabs it's much more likely that something the author intended
won't
be properly communicated because it's harder to control
horizontal
alignment.
> >> - They tell logically what
it's about, while spaces carry no such
> >> information.
>
>
> >Huh?
>
> What I meant is that a tab is kind of
like markup information in the
source.
> The tabs tell that this is
indentation.
>
> As I understand, the reason for this is mostly
that it's hard to check
that
> the practice is being followed. So
tabs are banned, as that is easier to
> check for.
Yes. In fact
it's impossible to check programmatically whether the practice
is being
followed. In general you need to know the author's intention in
order to
discern how things were meant to be
aligned.
-----------------------------------------------------------
David Abrahams * Boost Consulting
dave@boost-consulting.com * http://www.boost-consulting.com
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