I hate you all

[Timothy Madden]

On 06.04.2013 13:17, Joshua Landau wrote:
[...]
>
> 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.

When the default tab size is 8, than tab size does matter.

Because it is too much to use as indent size. If you still want to use 
tabs, you are now supposed to change tab size from the default. I 
believe using non-default tab size in a public environment like 
open-source code is bound to cause formatting problems for someone at 
some point.

> 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*?

Well all previous (python 2) code is meant to work for a tab size of 8. 
You may call this "categorically wrong", but it has been there a long 
while, is is still in use, and it sticks to the default.

Spaces-only can achieve compatibility between different people settings 
for formatted text like source code. But so does a common default for 
the tab size, and with that we do not have to limit ourselves to spaces 
only.

Now I understand python 3 people may already use tabs with a size of 4, 
as you said. Although I tried to show this is not good practice, (and 
that not many people do that, really, since most of them prefer to use 
all-spaces instead), still I do not expect the people to change their 
settings.

What I would expect is some option in python to make tabs work the way 
they used to. I want a choice for me to preserve my settings, the same 
way you want to preserve yours.

What I want should not be much to ask, since this is how python 2 used 
to do things.

I admit such a '--fixed-tabs' option, that will make tab stops be 8 
columns apart, and allow any number of spaces like in python 2, makes 
the code I write dependent on that option.

But the option will run all code written for the new "python 3 way", and 
brings back some compatibility, so it is not that bad. And some people 
might actually want it.

Timothy Madden