Tab characters considered harmful (Was: Emacs has eaten my python tabs!!!)

[Mark McEahern]

[Robin Munn]
> You know, the more I see the debate about spaces and tabs, the more
> puzzled I become that anyone still wants to use tabs.

I agree.  I prefer spaces too.  But what those who prefer tabs would say, I
think, is that they prefer tabs because if everyone used tabs, we wouldn't
have this problem.  ;-)

I haven't been following this thread, so I'm sure what I just said has
already been said (if not in this thread, surely countless times before).

Oh, another reason tabs are a problem is sometimes you end up
copying/pasting code that originally had tabs, but at some part in the chain
the tabs became spaces.  Since tabs devolve to spaces in some scenarios--and
not vice-versa--why not just start with spaces to begin with?

I'm sure there are tools out there that allow you to enforce a preference
for spaces, reindent.py, pychecker, etc.

This point will be argued by others until the cow turns blue.  Thankfully, I
won't be there to see.  ;-)

Cheers,

// m

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