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On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 08:11:41 GMT, Brian Inglis
Worse than that actually. An accumulation of errors: Programmer A brings up file, sees a couple things in the function he's working on that don't line up, fails to consider the effect of TABs, makes it look good for himself, makes his edits, saves the file.
jmfbahciv) writes: I was waiting for someone to mention that. Still, one ought to be able to indent three or four levels and have enough room left on the right-hand side for...
Programmer B does the same thing. Then C. And so on.
It's hard to blame them. They're used to dealing with files that don't have TABs. We generally let programmers use whatever tools they're comfortable with, and often they don't default to the same tab stops.
The problem that finally broke the code was an over-enthusiastic delete of "white space" that gobbled up a brace by accident, followed by replacement of the brace in the wrong place (it's almost poetry...).
Never. The coding standard required Allman-BSD-type formatting with a 4-character indent (I personally prefer 3, but I defer to the standard). Indeed, if programmer A had spent the time to fix the entire file (by replacing erronious TABs with spaces) the problem might not have occurred.
A good question, and appropriate meat for this forum. In my typing clbutt we were taught to use a 5-column indent. Go figure. Whether...
In fact, that's the argument I hear most often for using TABs: If you don't like the indents, just change them. Except it doesn't work.
And as I stated in an earlier post, proportional fonts are just as evil as TABs, for many of the same reasons.
Where did the 8-column tab come from? 8 column tabs are not a secretarial or publishing standard. The norm...
No one knew where the TABs came in, but my guess was that a newer programmer, less familiar with the tools we had available to him, had his editor misconfigured to insert TABs.
Regards,
-=Dave -- Change is inevitable, progress is not.