tabs do WHAT?

[Brett g Porter]

"Thomas Wouters" <thomas at xs4all.net> wrote in message
news:20000131153329.B19725 at xs4all.nl...
> """
> Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters.
> There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!)
> characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to
> be 3.
>
> Rationale: The whole idea behind indentation is to clearly define where
> a block of control starts and ends.  Especially when you've been looking
> at your screen for 20 straight hours, you'll find it a lot easier to see
> how the indentation works if you have large indentations.
>
...except that studies of actual human programmers say otherwise. From Steve
McConnell's "Code Complete" (pp 409-410):
"The same study ['Program Indention and Comprehensibility', Miaria, et al,
1983] found...[t]he lowest comprehension scores were achieved on programs
that were not indented at all. The second lowest were achieved on programs
that used six-space indentation. The study concluded that two to four space
indentation was optimal. Interestingly, many subjects in the experiment felt
that the six-space indentation was easier to use than the smaller
indentations, even though their scores were lower."

The original study was printed in the Nov 1983 Communications of the ACM.