Python Rocks!

[Dan Schmidt]

Just van Rossum <just at letterror.com> writes:

| >> ! - whats wrong with tabs?
| >
| >They don't look the same in every editor, or with each individual's
| >tab-width settings.
| 
| But it's easy to turn that argument around:
| 
| Tabs can be nice *because* they "don't look the same in every
| editor, or with each individual's tab-width settings": they allow
| the *viewer* of the source code to decide what layout looks best for
| him/her. Tabs are also far superior if you prefer a proportional
| width font (yes, people do that, too!).

Almost without exception, when I am handed a file that uses tabs, I
can tell what tab width was used to generate the file, and all other
tab widths look ugly.  The most common tipoff is right-hand-side
comments that line up only with one particular tab width.

So my conclusion, after seeing hundreds of files that use tabs, is
that in general they don't successfully allow the viewer to decide
what layout looks best; the file's going to look bad unless you pick
the One True Tab Width.

-- 
Dan Schmidt | http://www.dfan.org