Re: How to change the length of "\t"?
* James Kanze:
On Jul 15, 4:54 pm, Lionel B <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:16:28 +0200, Matthias Buelow wrote:
Lionel B wrote:
Certainly not by me! The first thing I do when configuring
an editor for programming (anything) is to change the
displayed TAB width to 4 (I might
Then everyone who has his editor or viewer at the
conventional eight spaces width will see your text garbled.
Errm... I'm not with you here. I don't see other peoples' text
garbled if I change the displayed tabwidth in my editor - I
just see the same text but with tabs taking up more or less
width - so why should they see *my* text garbled? I'm not
actually changing the text at all...
The only case I can think of where garbling might be said to
occur might be where someone has formatted text - say mixing
tabs and spaces - *under the assumption* that a tab occupies 8
spaces. And that's a dumb thing to do anyway.
Using anything other than 8 for tabstops is a dumb thing, since
that's the universal defacto standard today (and you certainly
don't look at text only in an editor).
I'm sorry, but that's not correct. The de facto Windows standard is 4 character
positions per tab stop. Tools from early eighties (e.g. Notepad) excepted.
Regarding what's dumb, the *nix de facto standard of 8 character positions per
tab stop is clearly dumb, since it's impractical for anything, and the lack of a
standard for indicating the tab stop and indentation settings of source code is
clearly dumb (would be a good candidate for a new C++ preprocessor directive :-)
). But I'm pretty sure that folks who have not enjoyed the benefits of working
in an environment with consistent 4-tabs, actually using tabs in source code,
will not immediately grasp why any of the abovementioned should be dumb. After
all, we manage quite fine without using tabs at all, thank you.
If you're using an
indentation other than 8 (and 8 is too big), then you have to
use some spaces for the indentation. (Because people are stupid
enough to set tabstops in their editor at something different
than 8, I've given up using tabs at all in text files. Just
spaces, so everyone will see the code as it was meant to be
formatted.)
Using spaces instead of tabs is a good recommendation for cross-platform work,
and it is, for example, the solution adopted by Boost.
Cheers,
- Alf (off-topic mood)
--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
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