Re: perlstyle and portability

[Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@ActiveState.com>]

On 29 Jan 2000 13:49:37 PST, Russ Allbery wrote:
>Pure space indentation looks better in diffs and stands less chance of
>accidental corruption by mailers and the like.  Pure tabs at least adds
>some consistency.  The mixed style is a touch annoying and ends up doing
>surprising things.

Only if you set your tabstops to a non-standard value (something other
than 8).  If you do that, you pay the price for being non-standard.

Eliminating all tabs from everywhere sounds nice in theory, but it ain't
gonna happen, because there's the small problem of educating people and
their editors to not use tabs.  It stands to reason that if you're going
to educate people and their editors, you might as well teach them not to
change the standard tabstop of 8, rather than teach them to avoid using
tabs altogether.

I suppose the principle of being "generous it what you accept, conservative
in what you send" applies here, but considering that every printer,
terminal device, and even Notepad on Windows has the right idea about
how to display tabs, I don't think the time has come for conservative
measures just because a few "clever" programmers have managed to screw
themselves up by fiddling with the standard tabstop.


Sarathy
gsar@ActiveState.com

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Follow-Ups from:

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
Hugo <hv@crypt.compulink.co.uk>

References to:

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>

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