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The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

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Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#31

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

jihadjihad wrote: post #4

Rob Pike on why Go is indented with tabs [0]: > How wide should the indentation be? 2 spaces? 4? 8? Something else? > By making the indent be a tab, you get to decide the answer to that question and everyone will see code indented as wide (or not) as they prefer. > In short, this is what the tab character is for. 0: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/iHGLTFalb54/m/zqMo...

Exactly.

Indentation != spacing.

And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#32

Post by skylurk »

marssaxman wrote: post #8
gte525u wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works until someone tries to vertically align something like a table or a line that is wrapped.

tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get away from languages where whitespace has semantics.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#33

Post by maccard »

o11c wrote: post #16
mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

There absolutely is a consensus: a hard tab is defined as 8 spaces in numerous standards (obviously this only applies to monospace fonts). The fact that people choose to reject this does not change the reality.

Really? What standards are they?

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#34

Post by Joker_vD »

o11c wrote: post #16
mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

There absolutely is a consensus: a hard tab is defined as 8 spaces in numerous standards (obviously this only applies to monospace fonts). The fact that people choose to reject this does not change the reality.

Like what standards, exactly? POSIX in its tabs(1) [0] and expand(1) [1] clearly states that tab stops can be wherever, and "every 8 columns" is just a default.

[0] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/t...

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/e...

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#35

Post by zamadatix »

o11c wrote: post #16
mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

There absolutely is a consensus: a hard tab is defined as 8 spaces in numerous standards (obviously this only applies to monospace fonts). The fact that people choose to reject this does not change the reality.

That still wouldn't give consensus on how many spaces people using spaces should use, it would (originally) give consensus on how many spaces a tab was supposed to be.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#36

Post by vouaobrasil »

phplovesong wrote: post #3

Tabs are better, simply because you can view them as you like. Go obviously does this, and Haxe too (with default formatting options, even tho its configurable)

I never bought this argument, because it seems the vast majority of people are fine with viewing tabs rendered as four spaces. And pretty much the default for spaces is four spaces. So I'm starting to think 99% of the world uses 4 spaces and it's the vocal minority that like 3 spaces or 5 spaces viewing for tabs. And in that case, the configurability is rather irrelevant.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#38

Post by notarobot123 »

The original "tabulator" key was intended to save time and effort aligning text with spaces. With the ubiquity of decent IDEs that objective is unnecessary.

I think there is a reasonable argument about the distinct semantic value of tabs but they introduce a concept that the general public think is superfluous when two spaces do the trick.

Words can become obsolete if there are other more commonly understood ways of expressing the same thing. This seems similar.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#39

Post by lesuorac »

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #31
jihadjihad wrote: post #4

Rob Pike on why Go is indented with tabs [0]: > How wide should the indentation be? 2 spaces? 4? 8? Something else? > By making the indent be a tab, you get to decide the answer to that question and everyone will see code indented as wide (or not) as they prefer. > In short, this is what the tab character is for. 0: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/iHGLTFalb54/m/zqMo...

Exactly. Indentation != spacing. And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.

You use tabs to delimitate tabular data.

Unless you're trying to argue that your code is a tsv file then tabs is the wrong thing to use.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#40

Post by jl6 »

Tabs are the modern choice, because you can then configure your editor so that for every tab character, it calls an LLM with the buffer contents up to that point, with instructions to generate an appropriate number of spaces that can then be substituted in. You might be thinking 2, 4, or 8, but the LLM will give you the contextually-correct answer.
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