OT: tabs and spaces

[Lasse KÃrkkÃinen / Tronic]

Hi,

When you write prettyprinters, programmers' editors or anything that 
does some kind of code indentation, please take care of the following rules:

1. NEVER convert N spaces into one tab; they are not equal with any N
2. count spaces and tabs separately (one tab for each { }, etc)
3. if aligning with anything (text, not indent), use spaces only
4. print tab chars at the very beginning of the line, never after any 
other characters

GNU indent and all other prettyprinters I know of violate the first 
three rules. I chose to write LKML because so many people writing 
indenting software, or just writing code, will be reading this now...

If the indentation is done this way, it never breaks with any tab width. 
The only (minor) issue concerns cutting long lines, because you cannot 
know the line length if you don't know tab length.

Before the flamewar begins: I am not saying that tab indentation or 
space indentation is better, just saying that the regular tab 
indentation is not optimal. So far I haven't seen anyone thinking that 
the regular way is better than this one, so there doesn't seem to be any 
debate about that.

If you agree with the above, please spread the message :)

As this is clearly off-topic, it may be better to answer to me only, not 
to the list.

- Tronic -

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