Re: Coding Style: indenting with tabs vs. spaces

From: Chris Snook
Date: Thu Nov 08 2007 - 11:02:53 EST


Benny Halevy wrote:
Greetings,

I would like to hear peoples opinion about the indentation convention
described below that I personally found the most practical with
several different editors.

The gist of it is that tabs should be used for nesting, not for decoration.
Indent your code with as many tabs as your nesting level, where all statements
will begin, and from there on use space characters.
The rational behind it is to be tab-width agnostic so regardless of your
tab expansion setup, the code will look correct and will make sense.

When you break a line and want the new line text to start below a specific point
relative to the previous line (I consider that "decorating") then start the new
line with the same number of tabs as the previous one and then just use space
characters as their width is the same as any character in the previous line,
(assuming fixed-width fonts of course).

I find it meaningful to indent extended lines one extra tab stop, but beyond that I agree it is just decoration.

-- Chris
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