Why?? (prog question)

[William Gordon Rutherdale]

Polytropon wrote:
> Okay, now I understand what you mean. "Consistency" refers to
> the usage of spacing / tabbing for a given project that is
> adopted by several programmers. Yes, I agree with that: It's
> a very bad idea to have many different styles within the same
> project.
>
> . . .
>
> When I need to read / work with other's code, it's can develop
> into problems. Natural habits like hitting the tab key are
> very hard to change several times, for each project a different
> rule.
> . . .
>   
> Not all editors have this ability. And especially under low level
> circumstances, e. g. editing with vi in SUM required in a maintenance
> phase, you'll be happy about every keystroke you can save.
>
>
>   
Most of my work is in a setting where the development machine is 
different from the target machine.  Usually on a development machine you 
have the luxury of setting up all the tools you want and configuring 
them however you want.  If you spend more time editing on the fly on a 
target machine, then that creates a different scenario, similar to doing 
sysadmin work.

I've made most of my main points, and I think we've got to where 
differences of opinion now rest mainly on taste, which in turn is often 
guided by what you're used to.  Consequently it's not possible to get 
much further, especially with the "I like 4 spaces because I'm used to 
them" vs. "I like 8-level tabs because I'm used to them" argument.

I find that as I move from project to project, indentation standards do 
change.  I find that where people have the resources to fully configure 
their development machines, reasonably thoughtful people who have 
experience in both standards end up converging on spaces being better 
than tabs because they are neater.  I also find that, given such a 
configuration choice, more people find 4-space indentation looks better 
on the screen than go with 2 or 8 or 3.

Consequently I stick with '4 spaces for indentation' as my norm, and if 
I have to switch to something else for a given project because people 
are using that standard, then I will change my editor settings.

> I'd like to add that tab based indentation is independent from
> the functionalities of a specific editor. It's even handy for
> printing where the tab width can be set to a certain value.
> Okay, your counterargument could now be: "Who prints today
> anyway?" :-)
>
>   
I'm more concerned with things like diff listings, where lines are 
preceded with:
 >
which breaks the tab indentation because everything is pushed over by a 
space or two.

> Personally, I have the (maybe outdated) opinion that a programmer should
> not only care for his programs to be valid, correct, efficient, well
> structured, intended and documented, but also tidy and styled. What's
> to understand from these words can be very individual, I agree.
>   
We agree on this point, which is why we're having this discussion.
>> There are lots of cases where it's hard to make code line up the way you
>> want it with tabs.  Often code that looks good with one tab length
>> setting (say 8) doesn't look so good with another (say 4).  It gets
>> especially bad when there are a few space characters thrown in, which
>> people often do.
>>     
>
> Okay, I didn't think of this. Taking this argument into mind, spaces
> can be useful for parameter lists that don't fit into one line, but
> should line up after the opening (, e. g.
>
> 	foofunction(&data, "%d,%d,%d", doodle.x, doodle.y, doodle,z,
> 	            foo, bar, pups, furz, "This is some stupid text.",
> 	            doom[dee].quoggle);
>
> This wouldn't be easy to achieve with tabs, especially when their
> width may vary.
>
>
>   
Even an 'if' or 'while' statement that spans more than one line can have 
problems like this.

Nice discussion.

-Will