Re: Tabs, spaces, indent and 80 character lines

From: Richard Knutsson
Date: Mon Feb 25 2008 - 16:45:08 EST


Benny Halevy wrote:
On Feb. 24, 2008, 7:40 -0800, Richard Knutsson <ricknu-0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Krzysztof Halasa wrote:
Richard Knutsson <ricknu-0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Why hinder a developer who prefer
2, 4, 6 or any other != 8 width?
I guess we could use tabs only at the line start, for indentation
only. Rather hard to implement, most text editors can't do that yet.
You mean for split lines? Hopefully there won't be that many, so there is just to delete the tabs it added and replace it with spaces.

IMO, tabs SHOULD be used for syntactic indentation and spaces for
decoration purpose only. I.e. a line should start with a number of tabs
equal to its nesting level and after that only spaces should be used.
for example, the following code

for (i = 0; i < n; i++) printk("a very long format string", some, parameters);

should be formatted like this:

<tabs...>for (i = 0; i < n; i++)
<tabs...><tab>printk("a very long format string",
<tabs...><tab> some, parameters);

this will show exactly right regardless of your editor's tab expansion setting
as long as you use fixed-width fonts - where the screen width of the space character
is equal to all other characters. Once you start using tabs instead of spaces
to push text right so it appears exactly below some other text on the line above
you make a dependency on *your* editor's tab expansion policy and that's not very
considerate for folks who prefer a different one.
Don't know what to say more then: Yup! :)

But the CodeStyle-document and checkpatch.pl does not agree with that.

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