Tab indentions on different platforms?

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

Ben Finney writes:

> Torsten Bronger <bronger at physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
>
>> [...] the width of a tab is nowhere defined. It really is a
>> matter of the editor's settings.
>
> RFC 678 "Standard File Formats"
> <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc678.txt>:
>
>          Horizontal Tab  <HT>
>
> [...]

As far as I can see, this excerpt of a net standard has been neither
normative nor influential on the behaviour of text editors.

>> I, for example, dislike too wide indenting. I use four columns in
>> Python and two in Delphi. However, there are Python projects
>> using eight spaces for each indentation level.
>
> How many columns to indent source code is an orthogonal question
> to how wide an ASCII TAB (U+0009) should be rendered. [...]

I don't know what you want to say with this.  Obviousy, it is
impossible to indent four columns with 8-columns tabs.  Anyway, my
sentence was supposed just to lead to the following:

>> If all Python code used tabs, everybody could use their own
>> preferences, for both reading and writing code, and
>> interoperability would be maintained nevertheless.
>
> Interoperability isn't the only criterion though. On the contrary,
> source code is primarily for reading by programmers, and only
> incidentally for reading by the compiler.

Well, I, the programmer, want code snippets from different origins
fit together as seemlessly as possible, and I want to use my editor
settings for every piece of Python code that I load into it.

Tschö,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
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