Tabs or spaces – Parsing a 1B files among 14 programming languages

Post by CJefferson » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 1:53 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #49

CJefferson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My other personal feeling is that it's easy to auto-check we aren't using tabs (just search for tabs, and reject if any are found). Depending on how you choose to format, it can be arbitrarily hard to check tabs are being used correctly. For example, many people want to do some space indenting, such as: void my_function(int arg1, int arg2, int arg3) { It's (I believe) impossible for a language-agnostic tool to know t…

Don't align. void my_function( int arg1, int arg2, int arg3, ... ) {

Post by yxhuvud » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #48

akerro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or python, or rust.

Python doesn't care either way as long as indentation is consistent (though there's a common misunderstanding that Python cares). However PEP-8 specifies that code should be indented using 4 spaces and editors should be configured to render tabs as 8 spaces (likely to make mixed tabs & spaces really obvious). But PEP-8 also specifies that code should follow whatever is the coding standard in a given project. IOW, Pyt…

Post by rdtsc » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

akerro wrote: post #28

gepoch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're using golang,in which case gofmt will correct you. Hence the overwhelming consensus of the go row for tabs.

or python, or rust.

Post by mbrock » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 2:05 PM UTC

mcos wrote: post #64

The biggest problem with the spaces vs tabs debate is that editor presentation is still tightly coupled to file persistence. Imagine an abstraction layer created so that developers might choose to see what they wished, yet have files saved in a standard format it might negate some of the issues people have.

Post by claudius » Wed, Aug 31, 2016, 2:07 PM UTC

lethargic_meat wrote: post #3

Some IDEs will convert tabs to spaces when saving and the other way around when editing, so, while your approach is interesting, not really a proof of a majority choice. Also my beef is specially with people who don't use tabs in files like fstab, like beasts.

    this_is_a_long_linedefaults…
    shortdefaults…