Re: underline-line

[Tim X]

Cecil Westerhof <Cecil@decebal.nl> writes:

> pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) writes:
>
>> Cecil Westerhof <Cecil@decebal.nl> writes:
>> There should be no problem with tabs, because there should be not tab
>> in text files.
>
> I do not use them, but I know that other people do. Better to describe
> the consequences then, so that people are not taken by surprise.
>
>
>> The only place where prefix tabs are allowed, for historical reasons
>> is in Makefile.  
>
> I know a lot of people who use it for indenting and it is used for
> 'tables'. But maybe I should give a warning when tabs are found in the
> text.
> But maybe I should document the function works with 'clean' text files.

I personally don't think tabs are a problem What is a problem is when
you get source files that have a mixture of tabs and spaces where they
are not used consistently. 

Using tabs for indent can actuallly be very useful. If I'm working with
a team and we all have different preferences for how large our code
indents are, rather than forcing a standard indent size on all team
members, we can just use tabs and each member can set the tab width to
their preferred indent size i.e. 2 spaces, 4 spaces, 8 spaces etc. 

The problem is when you have some people indenting using spaces and some
using tabs. Then all the indenting gets screwed up. 

I don't have an issue with tabs in Makefiles. The emacs Makefile mode
can show tabs/spaces, so its easy to see when something is wrong/missing
a leading tab. 

I doubt we can change make effectively. There are millions of lines of
makefile code with tabs out there (I was told there are more lines of
Makefile code out there than Ruby). Much of this code is in projects
that are unlikely to have the inclination or resoruces to want to modify
 their Makefiles to remove the tabs. Changing make to handle just
 generic whitespace (i.e. space or tab) would be possible, but it won't
 remove tabs from the equation. We are pretty much stuck with them for
 the time being.

Tim



-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au