From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2004-02-24T13:38:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Appropriate use of camelCase

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Patrick Bennett wrote:

> FWIW, I have yet to hear a good reason for hard tabs.  :)   As soon as a 
> *single* space is used *anywhere* on a line after tabs, the tabs mean 
> nothing and will cause the indentation to be mismatched on someone 
> else's system.  With spaces, the indentation is *always* correct.

LOL.  I'm a convert from spaces to tabs.  With tabs, I don't have to 
hassle with what someone else's notion of proper indentation width is.  I 
just set my preference in the editor and that is what I see.  Someone else 
can set a different preference if they like.

Tabs are also faster for me.  It's a tangible difference when I am writing 
a lot of code, and when I am really into a coding groove it's always my 
fingers that are the limiting factor to how fast I can produce the code, 
so every little bit helps.

Spaces mixed with tabs can mess the indentation up (though not 
necessarily), but I don't find that to be a significant factor, for me.  
If there are spaces mixed with tabs, I've been sloppy, and I fix it.  It 
rarely affects me adversely, though, whereas the freedom to adjust 
indentation through editor settings and the speed increase that I get from 
it helps me.  If I had a neural interface that reduced the bottleneck that 
my fingers impose on me, tabs would lose much of their advantage over 
spaces, for me.

As in most of these issues, it's completely subjective.  :)


Kirk Haines