Emacs auto-modes and tabs
Erik Price
erikprice at mac.com
Thu Apr 17 07:49:48 EDT 2003
On Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 04:33 PM, pll at lanminds.com wrote:
> Well, there are many, many diatribes against using tabs. Why, I
> don't know, but there are :) I think some of it might have to do
> with broken mail readers and proportionally spaced fonts, or
> something, but really, I have no idea.
My understanding is that it is often a project guideline or
requirement. The Python style guide
(<http://python.org/doc/essays/styleguide.html>) strongly recommends
spaces over tabs (and tabs should be 4-spaces wide), and in this
language it really is important to at least standardize on one or the
other (and not both) since indentation level is so significant to the
syntax. And both Sun's Java code conventions
(<http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/
CodeConventions.doc3.html#262>) and the respected "Elements of Java
Style" book recommend using four spaces for each tab too.
There seem to be quite a few open source projects that request it for
submissions/patches, as well. (Though I imagine there are quite a few
that prefer real tabs, I just haven't seen them.)
Erik
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