ANN: Dao Language v.0.9.6-beta is release!

Tom Anderson twic at urchin.earth.li
Sat Dec 3 14:55:05 EST 2005


On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, paulo.jpinto at gmail.com wrote:

> Dave Hansen wrote:
>
>> TAB characters are evil.  They should be banned from Python source 
>> code. The interpreter should stop translation of code and throw an 
>> exception when one is encountered.  Seriously.  At least, I'm serious 
>> when I say that.  I've never seen TAB characters solve more problems 
>> than they cause in any application.
>>
>> But I suspect I'm a lone voice crying in the wilderness.  Regards,
>
> You're not alone.
>
> I still don't get why there is still people using real tabs as
> indentation.

I use real tabs. To me, it seems perfectly simple - i want the line to be 
indented a level, so i use a tab. That's what tabs are for. And i've 
never, ever come across any problem with using tabs.

Spaces, on the otherhand, can be annoying: using spaces means that the 
author's personal preference about how wide a tab should be gets embedded 
in the code, so if that's different to mine, i end up having to look at 
weird code. Navigating and editing the code with arrow-keys under a 
primitive editor, which one is sometimes forced to do, is also slower and 
more error-prone.

So, could someone explain what's so evil about tabs?

tom

-- 
Space Travel is Another Word for Love!



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