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[Seebs]

On 2010-11-06, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> If someone were to use a text editor which had always historically
> mangled whitespace I would find myself wondering why they found it
> necessary to restrict themselves to such stone-age tools.

I have yet to find an editor that allows me to, well, *edit*, more
comfortably than vi.

As to what it does with whitespace... What it does is exactly what
is most desireable in every other kind of file I edit.  I wouldn't
normally refer to it as "mangling" in the pejorative sense; it mostly
leaves spaces alone, but when preserving indentation from one line
to the next, uses tabs.  That, it turns out, is useful and desireable
in nearly all programming languages, and in particular, in all
the other programming languages I use.

I don't think it's fair to accuse tools of being "stone age" on the
grounds that they do something which most users want most of the
time by default.  The "no tabs, only spaces" thing is an interesting
idiosyncrasy of a particular community, which places a high value
on telling people to change everything about their computing
environment so they can appreciate how robust Python is when you
make a point of blaming any and all quirks or nuisances on tools.

We might as well insist that everyone use editors which automatically
add the braces to C code (such exist) when they complain about
the "effort" of typing matching braces.  Surely, if you have to
type braces by hand, the problem isn't with C, but with your
stone age editor?  Oh, wait.  That kind of smug dismissiveness
is considered rude unless it's done in *favor* of Python.

-s
-- 
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed.  Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam at seebs.net
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I am not speaking for my employer, although they do rent some of my opinions.