[TxMt] tabs

[Ryan Schmidt]

If I write this...

1.	function something(parameter) {
2.		if (condition) {
3.			statement;
4.		}
5.	}

...then line 3 is intended twice, lines 2 and 4 are indented once, and 
lines 1 and 5 are not indented at all. I hope everyone can at least 
agree on that. I personally prefer to indent by the width of 4 spaces 
and have my editor configured to show tab characters this way. Perhaps 
later I will decide to reduce this to 3 spaces. To make this change, I 
merely have to open my editor preferences and change one value. I 
object to others forcing their indentation width preferences on me by 
giving me documents which are indented entirely with space characters. 
For this reason I assert that people SHOULD use tab characters to 
indent -- at least at the beginning of a line. (I am, however, against 
using tabs in the middle or at the end of a line, because that again 
has the effect of linking tabs to a particular number of spaces.)

And this (yes, I'm gonna call it) "emacs style" indentation where, in 
the above example, line 3 is indented with a tab, and lines 2 and 4 are 
indented with 4 spaces, is the epitome of stupidity and shows a 
complete lack of understanding of the purpose of tabs. The tab 
character is not a shorthand way to write 8 spaces. It is a way to 
indicate that the text should be indented once more. Creating a 
document in this emacs style says "my editor wants to use 8 spaces for 
tabs, but I want 4, and I'm gonna work around the problem rather than 
correct my editor's settings." And it absolutely forces the viewer of 
the file to have an editor that uses exactly 8 spaces (no more, no 
less) for a tab character. That's not how I have my editor set up, 
therefore that's rude.

So, the real problem is that emacs has a mode which allows this mess. 
If emacs didn't have such a mode, such files would never come into 
existence. Why compound the problem by giving this misfeature to 
another editor?

If one does have to work with and maintain such braindead indentation 
policies, I'm with Eric that one should write encoder and decoder 
scripts. But the IMHO correct solution is to check out the files, fix 
them to correct tab usage, and check them back in (with a checkin 
comment like "fixed braindead indentation"), and force everybody else 
to fix their editor settings. I mean, God help us if we had to program 
workarounds for every user who couldn't be bothered to properly 
configure their computer.


On 29.12.2004, at 10:51, Xavier Noria wrote:

> On Dec 29, 2004, at 10:32 AM, Eric Ocean wrote:
>
>>
>> On Dec 28, 2004, at 5:01 PM, Patrick Kelly wrote:
>>
>>> Like I said, it may be possible for me to rid the files I edit of 
>>> all tabs by using the expand unix utility.  The problem with that is 
>>> causing large, meaningless diffs when I checkin my changes to CVS.
>>
>> You could always convert back to emacs style
>
> I think calling that "emacs sytle" or relating this issue to emacs as 
> in other messages is not fair.
>
> That's the configuration those folks happen to have. Of course emacs 
> can be configured to use soft tabs, and of course ANY editor that 
> allows hard tabs will have to mix tabs and spaces to line up certain 
> things. The mixture is the price you pay for using hard tabs in ANY 
> editor.
>
> So the real problem is that the OP is not following the convention of 
> the team regarding soft/hard tabs. Not that the convention is wrong.
>
> -- fxn
>
>
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