I hate you all

[Joshua Landau]

On 6 April 2013 07:56, Timothy Madden <terminatorul at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 06.04.2013 08:53, Ian Kelly wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 11:07 PM, Timothy Madden <terminatorul at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
> [...]
>
>> So in other words, everybody must be forced to use 8-character tabs
>> because you want to be able to mix tabs and spaces.
>>
>>  People say I can use tabs all the way, just set them to the indent I
>>> want.
>>>
>>> Well, I always had my indent independent of the tab size. Which is the
>>> way
>>> it should be, after all, since one can indent with or without tabs, so
>>> indent should not be tied to them.
>>>
>>> But now I can not; python no longer lets me do that.
>>>
>>
>> Honestly, I really don't understand why you *want* to do that.  If
>> your indentation is 4 characters, then that would be the natural tab
>> width to use.  If you're not going to tie your indent to your tabs,
>> then why even use tabs in the first place?
>>
>>  The new rules may look flexible at first sight, but the net effect they
>>> have
>>> is they push me to use non-default tab size (which is not good),
>>>
>>
>> What makes that not good?  There is no law anywhere that says tabs are
>> 8 characters.  That's just an arbitrary amount that looked appropriate
>> to the people designing the first teletypes.
>>
>
> I am aware that 7 bytes per tab character (or 14/28, in UTF-16, UTF-32!)
> will not justify the time spent debating.
>
> The reason I want to use tabs is that I think there is nothing wrong with
> them.
>

So use them


> The reason why everybody should use 8-character tabs is so that I and the
> rest of the world can use `grep` / `findstr` on their code, and still see
> lines of code properly aligned in the terminal. Or to be able to print
> fragments of code as plain text only, and get the proper alignment.
>

Oh thanks. I liked using my four character tabs, but I guess you *are* so
important that I'm going to have to change everything I do just for you.
It's obviously not good enough for you just to not mix tabs and spaces so
that we can both enjoy ourselves because that would make *you*, the holiest
of all, have to put some effort in. No, I totally understand and will now
go and change everything after Python is changed to break hundreds of files
of codes for you.


> But most importantly, the reason that tab size should be 8 is so that all
> of us people in this world can freely exchange formatted text like source
> code without having to first consider if "will it look the same in their
> editor ? What tab size do they use ?"
>

Hrm. Hrm. Hrrrrmmm.

Hrrrrmmmm.

No, you're right: spaces are totally not for this in any way and that
no-one has ever made this point before and who the hell cares if you're
reading code with a different indent size anyway it's not like it affects
the actual code.

Yours frustratedly,

Joshua Landau

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But seriously, please at least look like you've read other people's posts.
It doesn't matter what tabstop you use as long as you don't mix. If your
code depends on tab size then it's categorically wrong. Other people's tab
sizes are as valid. I use tabs because of the variation it lets me have - I
can switch tab sizes on the fly - and it's faster on "dumb" editors. So let
me do that.

But let us assume we were going to standardise on TAB == 8 SPACES. It would
*still* be bad to mix tabs and spaces. Hence you'd change Python in exactly
0 ways. So *what do you want from us*?
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