On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Gerhard Fiedler
<lists@connectionbrazil.com> wrote:
> Manu Abraham wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Harry H. Arends wrote:
>>> Most code is getting messedup when users use Tab's in their code.
>>> That would not be a problem is you instruct the used editor to
>>> replace them by spaces such as in the MPLAB editor.
>>>
>>> Code starting in the first colom with comments is def. Not readyble
>>> and someone that would like to help is not going to decyfer this.
>>> And some people on the list can be sometimes vey direct, but read
>>> between the lines and yoy wil see some interesting solutions.
>>
>> Not to offend anyone, i am new to this list.
>>
>> FWIW, Wouldn't it be better, if you instruct the email client to
>> handle tabs properly,
>
> Now if you can define what means "handle tabs properly", we could get
> somewhere. What a tab means is 100% dependent on what the individual
> editor is set up to make it mean. I have worked in places where a tab
> was every 4 positions, 3 positions, 8 positions... you get the idea :)
> There are even editors that can be set up to have tab locations at
> irregular places (sometimes used for assembly).
>
> So the only way to share code between different editors without messing
> with the configuration of the editor is to not use tabs.


Sorry, that it stirred up such a long discussion on this list. I
didn't want to add more fuel to this long discussion, but there are
reasons why generally spaces are avoided in code maintenance. I am not
saying that anyone follow the style what i am using, but just stated
what i have been using instead.

 Some years following a certain coding style puts you into that style
alone. It just got me surprised when someone said use spaces instead
of tabs. None of the people whom i knew complained of using tabs, but
complained of using spaces ..  All this with e-mails containing
patches for the source code. (There is no question of unreadability
there). So, i guess the question of spaces arrives from a broken
e-mail client.

What i am used to: An indent is one tab and one tab is 8 columns of
lines and a line can be a max of 80 chars long. You mix up spaces with
that, then you get a messed style. Add to that there e-mail clients
that do word-wrapping and other auto-formatting which makes things
worser.



Well, some SCM's can be forced to handle whitespaces, but there are
still quirks with that.
 for example:http://www.nabble.com/Any-way-to-fake-%22hg-annotate--w%22--td17995526.html

http://kerneltrap.org/node/5100
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle
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