Tabs -vs- Spaces: Tabs should have won.

Andrew Berg bahamutzero8825 at gmail.com
Sat Jul 16 20:29:30 EDT 2011


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On 2011.07.16 06:52 PM, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> Only for leading indentation, not following indentation. Consider 
> docstrings and other stuff with embedded fixed witdh layout.
I try to avoid aligning things unless not doing it really hurts
readability for that reason. For example, in most of my source files, I
use tabs to indent. Since Python won't allow a mix of tabs and spaces
(for whitespace) on one line, I don't try to align things:

		else:
			self.x264_cmd = [
				self.x264_exe, self.avs_file,
				'--fps', self.fpsr,
				'--sar', self.sar,
				'--crf', self.crf,
				'--level', self.level,
				'--keyint', self.ki,
				'--min-keyint', self.minki,
				'--ref', self.ref,
				'--weightp', self.weightp,
				'--bframes', self.bframes,
				'--b-adapt', self.badapt,
				'--me', self.me,
				'--merange', self.merange,
				'--direct', self.direct,
				'--trellis', self.trellis,
				'--subme', self.subme,
				'--deblock', self.deblock,
				'--output', self.video_output
				]

But it's still very readable.

However, when alignment really matters, such as in a module's setup.py,
spaces are the way to go:

from distutils.core import setup

setup(
    name         = 'Elucidation',
    version      = '0.0.1-WIP',
    py_modules   = ['elucidation'],
    author       = 'Andrew Berg',
    author_email = 'bahamut at digital-signal.net',
    url          = '',
    platforms    = 'Windows',
    description  = 'Provides a class for storing information on
multimedia files that are to be converted or remuxed and methods to
convert and remux using popular tools.'
    )


Of everything I've read on tabs vs. spaces, this is what makes the most
sense to me:
http://www.iovene.com/61/

- -- 
CPython 3.2.1 | Windows NT 6.1.7601.17592 | Thunderbird 5.0
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