Wasting 90% of space screen like a bad version of QBASIC
Invisible indentation bugs
Any text conversion can screw up the code
Slow as fuck and gobbles memory like a rabid snake(a python is fitting metaphor).
Guided by King Guido van Rossum. Dissenters are told to repent for their unpythonic ways and get lost.
Predictably there very few good python engines(stackless/Cpython) and they too suffer from language limitations like Global Interpreter Lock
The real problem is that people thing that eight-space tabs are a good idea.
This man speaks the truth. When will the world realise that the 3-space standard, as advocated by the "TROLLGOL STEERING COMMITTEE", is the superior choice?
>>8
No tabs should be anything but a multiple of 2 * spaces in length.
No function that takes arguments that could span multiple lines is less than 4 characters wide: printf ("Hello\n"
"<- That was a tab!\n");
Nobody in their right mind would waste source code size with multiple tabs.
Even in an 80-column terminal (to encourage terse, yet still legible code) 8-width tabs are not a problem.
>>11
you shouldn't use tabs for alignment, because it will break if someone views your code with a different tab size. tabs should only be used for indentation.
>>15
190 columns should be more than enough for any code.
Name:
Anonymous2010-07-15 11:15
Standards are for morons. Next you'll tell me that murdering is wrong and we shouldn't cross road on red light. Tab should exactly 1 space long. This way we'll free one key on our keyboard for our pleasure.
Free key!
Name:
Anonymous2010-07-15 11:20
i have worked in maine, new hampshire, new york,utah, colorado,florida,bahamas.
never indented my code!
I used to use 8-space tabs in all my C code. Every once in a while (like 1 out of 50 functions I wrote) it resulted in nasty stuff way over to the right, but some of those functions (like hand-written parsers) were *important*.
Then I started writing code that called into libraries. Shit like "pango_font_description_set_family_static", "CTLineCreateWithAttributedString", and "GL_CLIENT_VERTEX_ARRAY_BIT".
So I switched to 4 spaces per tab, and made my editor use spaces so other people can read my code correctly.
Name:
Anonymous2010-07-16 0:11
Tabs have no fixed size/width.
If your code requires a tab being 8 spaces you're abusing tabs and should fix it immediately.
>>13
There is no standard tab size. That's the whole point of them.
What happens to long lines is the editor's problem.
>>26
Sometimes, as in argument lists spanning broken up in mroe than one line or other very specific cases.
Name:
Anonymous2010-07-16 22:25
Why use tabs when your code doesn't look right with other tab widths anyway?
There is no advantage to using spaces except that your code will compile a little faster (and generate faster code) because the it doesn't have to read/parse as much data.
Name:
Anonymous2010-07-16 22:31
>>33
This. Tabs were more important back in the old days of 16-bit computing and the 1MB memory limits of pre-EMS/XMS DOS.
Most large, multi-developer projects I've worked on lately mandate indentation of 4-space characters for source files.
The only exception would be HTML/XML markup that is served over the internet, but generally, smart people strip out the white space and/or use gzip as the encoding anyway.
>>33 There is no advantage to using spaces except that your code will compile a little faster (and generate faster code) because the it doesn't have to read/parse as much data. generate faster code
IHBT
>>38
Why would there be a difference? In most languages whitespaces is merely disregarded. In languages with significant whitespace, it has meaning, but in the case of spaces vs tabs, the whole thing is irrelevant. Since both cases should parse to the same AST, they will generate the same code, so there is no difference. The difference is during READ time (lex/parse), but it should have no impact on code generation.
>>41 the claim that the generated code will be faster.
It's due to race conditions in the compiler where certain parts of the code will not have been parsed in time and thus do not enjoy the earliest optimizations applied.