William Chops Westfield wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:33 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> 
>>> I'm a big proponent of tabs (it hurts my sense of frugality to use 8
>>> spaces where one tab would do (yes, even in this day and age when
>>> text file size is largely irrelevant.))
>> 
>> That's really silly, but it seems you know that.  Put the dead fish
>> down and use logic instead of superstition. 
>> 
>> Let's put this in perspective.  Let's say you've written 1 MLines of
>> code, and every one of them wasted 7 characters.  That's a whole
>> whopping 7Mb.
> 
> Except for ASM code there is typically one tab before the opcode, one
> tab after, and then several tabs between the arguments and the
> comment (in column 48 or so.)  So using spaces instead of tabs
> probably adds 20+ characters per line, probably close to doubling the
> size of the program. 

If you are concerned about disk space, you could set up your disk to
compress the data. 

> In general, the whole argument is silly.  Any reasonable editor can be
> set up to properly handle any of the possibilities.  

Yes and no. Imagine that you work on code for several clients (or
several public code repositories, or several departments of a company),
and each of the clients (or public code repositories, or departments)
has a different tab width spec. Now configure your favorite editor to
handle this mess automatically -- and properly, so that you don't get
complaints from the others if you change something in their code.

This is /much/ easier to do if no tabs are used.

> It's only in the communication to large groups that there is a problem

Two people without a common tab spec could already qualify here... :)

Gerhard
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