On Nov 8, 2006, at 10:41 PM, Jacob Rus wrote:
Let me clarify...
Jacob Rus wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
It's not just emacs; this is very common in vi as well. [...]
- There's no standard for carrying the tab size around with the
file. Given any file, there's no way to tell if it uses 8 or 4 column tabs without manually inspecting it. [...]
This is an argument against using tabs at all
In this situation, if you're not using the original coders [sic] tab size, you end up with the stuff at the right-hand not lining up.
This is also an argument against using tabs
Ok, fine. Changing tab size could be bad, if someone still is using some random editor no one has ever heard of, which can't handle any tab size other than 8. So what's the benefit to coding like this instead of just using spaces? Is it just saving a few bytes?
To clarify my statement, so there are no ruffled feathers: Every editor worth its salt can interpret tabs to be any desired size. This includes bbedit, emacs, vim, and textmate. But emacs (and apparently vim) want to do this odd dance where you use 4-space tabs, but replace pairs of them with literal tab characters to save 7 bytes. This just seems absurd to me. Can you give any rational explanation why anyone would want to do this?
Back in the old days, saving 7 bytes was even more significant than those two bytes you saved by not storing the year on dates (pre-Y2K).
God I feel old sometimes...
S