Re: perlstyle and portability

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 13.24 -0800 2000.01.29, Zeek Watson wrote:
>The formatting of core modules uses an unfriendly,
>unportable layout.  I am talking about the use of 4
>spaces for an indent and a tab for an eight column
>indent.  Formatting of scripts is buggered if your OS
>doesn't enforce tabs to be 8 columns.

No OS enforces that, that I am aware of.

Personally, I like spaces better than tabs, just because if everything is a
space, then there is no problem in any text editor.  In any event, I
dislike 60-column emails a lot more than I dislike tabbed source code.


>It is time to leave this proprietary unix file format
>behind.

There is nothing proprietary or "Unix" about the formatting.  It is a style
lots of people use on lots of platforms.


>For those who want to preach about their editor, how
>it allows this and that and and more (read vi people),
>head over to one of the python/awk/vb lists.  Nobody
>and I mean *NOBODY* wants another editor war.  Post
>that religious drivel elsewhere.

The simple fact is that if your editor cannot handle this common style of
formatting, then your editor is subfunctional.  All good editors can handle
it.  This is not a matter of religion, it is a matter of basic
functionality.  It is like saying that we should not use $1 as a variable
name because it looks like $l in some fonts.  If your tool cannot handle
what is by definition a common thing like this, then get a better tool, or
just deal with it.

I have never used a text editor for programming that couldn't handle this
kind of thing, whether it was emacs, vi, BBEdit, Alpha, etc.

-- 
Chris

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References to:

Zeek Watson <macfreakz@yahoo.com>

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