221–230 of 238 posts
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If you enforce a specific width it's dumb to use tabs, just use spaces
I don't think anybody in our team uses tabs, but afaik you still call it tab width
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You can't use spaces to align because you can't assume a monospaced font will always be used. You can't use tabs either for that matter. If you need structure, use the language's punctuation and line breaks.
You can use tabs, that’s exactly their role, but only in theory since in practice elastic tab stops that would work with proportional fonts aren’t implemented anywhere in code, only word processors
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You can use tabs, that’s exactly their role, but only in theory since in practice elastic tab stops that would work with proportional fonts aren’t implemented anywhere in code, only word processors
no, i can't. i want to be able to align on arbitrary columns, not on tab stops. and when i add or remove character that break the alignment, tabs mess everything up. spaces don't.
commas.
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no, i can't. i want to be able to align on arbitrary columns, not on tab stops. and when i add or remove character that break the alignment, tabs mess everything up. spaces don't.
No, you can't do that with spaces because spaces have a fixed width, which can't always be aligned to a variable width column. Only in the primitive environment of fixed width fonts does this work, but even there the tabstops can also be placed at an arbitrary column position, check Word out
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…
I used to defend tabs for this reason, except I kept running into source code formatters/displays online that would attempt to display my code with the tabstop set to 8 spaces, which made it nigh-unreadable. While I run into fewer that do this nowadays, it still reminds me that with tabs, What I Write May Not Be What You See, which can lead to readability issues, which I feel is a solid enough point against tabs that…
Which is the right thing to do. When did the tab stopped having 8 spaces ?