Revision f6a67901e79d8d35e6bf30f0766b2417740090b7

[Richard Laager]

On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 14:05 -0400, Ethan Blanton wrote:
> Richard Laager spake unto us the following wisdom:
> > On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 10:06 -0400, Ethan Blanton wrote:
> > > For the record, _tabs are 8 spaces_.
> > 
> > > (Note that I myself also prefer 4-space indentation -- but that is a
> > > completely separate issue.)
> > 
> > If you use tabs for indentation and spaces for lining things up, this is
> > never* a problem, regardless of the tab width.
> 
> While this is sort of true, and we have discussed it numerous times in
> #pidgin, let me give you an example of where it falls down: actually
> using tabs for tabulation.  Lest you think this is a contrived
> example, see the table in irc/parse.c:55 with a tab stop of four.
> There are places like that all over Pidgin.
> 
> You can claim that such alignment should be done with spaces,

Yes, I would. ASCII has no way of setting tab stops, so you end up
needing to use multiple tabs in some cases. Then, if you change
something in one column, you can end up widening it enough to require
adding another tab to all the other columns. This has happened to me
with code in Pidgin too many times to count. At that point, it's no more
trouble to just do it with spaces anyway.

> but in
> that case, you have completely removed all utility of the TAB
> character

The "indentation" utility still remains.

I think we're applying different value to different points, so we'll
always disagree here.

Richard
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