[Tutor] tabs or spaces (the endless debate!)

[Erik Price]

On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 04:19  PM, R. Alan Monroe wrote:

>> Because if you write your code to wrap at 79 chars (which is a good
>> idea for readability) then whether a tab is 4 or 8 chars matters (and
>
> In my opinion, this is more a legacy problem. On all the major
> platforms we have editors that can display long lines using scroll
> bars or methods of scrolling. This isn't vi on vt220 any more :^)

So when you print your code, you print it in landscape orientation on 
11"x17" paper?

I'm pretty sure it is a violation of most coding standards (including 
the Guido recommendation I linked to earlier) to exceed 80 characters 
per line, regardless of what your editor is capable of doing.  Feel 
free to do it with your own stuff, but shared code should take into 
account many different viewing formats (and yes I do occasionally read 
code in 80 char-columned term windows).

> So? It's purely cosmetic. The content remains true.

Hmm... if code formatting was purely cosmetic then I doubt that that 
Python would have been designed to require a specific 
whitespace-sensitive formatting.  There's more to code formatting than 
meets the eye. :)

> Anyway, I don't think there's a single "right" answer to this
> question. I have always used real tabs up until now, but I'm trying
> spaces on my latest project just for comparison. :^)

I agree with you, there is no universal answer, the only "right" answer 
would be the one in the code style guide you or your team is using.


Erik





-- 
Erik Price

email: erikprice@mac.com
jabber: erikprice@jabber.org