Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Finally, when another developer looks at the code, their IDE will render the tabs as whatever its set up for, 2 spaces, 4 spaces, etc. In other words, it adds flexibility. This is exactly why I use tabs and the reason which appears to never get cited in the holy wars. People who use spaces want to line up their '=' signs, that's fine, but I don't believe it's my position to enforce the amount of whitespace another…
> This is exactly why I use tabs and the reason which appears to never get cited in the holy wars. I see this cited every time. Unfortunately, it's bogus in practice. Consider: print('some long thing', further, arguments) If this is an indented block, you'd have to indent the second line to the correct depth with tabs, then add exactly six spaces for alignment . You have to mix spaces and tabs, which is never good ne…
That being said, this problem and problems like it can be solved simply by not aligning things visually:
print(
'some long thing',
further,
arguments
)
I think that's what the argument really comes down to – alignment flexibility vs display flexibility. It's interesting to see which people generally prefer.