this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Tabs are literally designed for aligned indentation, and they're configurable for clientside viewing. There is no excuse for spaces. I don't care if your goddang function arguments line up once they spill out onto another line. You've got deeper problems.
Tabs are designed for tabulation (hence the name), not indentation. The side effect is that a tab's length changes based on its position in a line, which is terrible for programming. If you use tabs in the Python REPL, it looks like this:
What does this even mean? A tab is a tab.
Tab's don't have multiple lengths inside a file, they all have the same length.
That's the point of tabs.
The horizontal tabulation character moves the cursor to the next column which is a multiple of the tabulation length. See the examples here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key
At least for me, it renders like this:
Clearly the whitespace produced by each tab character has a different length.
Yes
No, each tab has the same size, the text rendered over the top of the tabs are not the same size.
Always remember the golden rule: Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.
How long is a newline?
A newline is the separator between lines, so the concept of length doesn't make sense for it.
Correct.
And a tab is the separator between stops.
Indeed. It's a separator, so using it for indentation doesn't make sense.
Stops are indentation.
They're what you indent... to.
Tab goes to the next stop, the same way newline goes to the next line. Exactly the same way. If you write more text before the next line, the amount of whitespace shrinks. That doesn't mean the "length" of a newline changes. It always goes one line.
A tab always goes one stop.
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment
Pressing tab and having the appropriate number of spaces added is objectively the only right answer.
But you can set a tab width instead so any developer editing the code can adjust the indentation width to his liking, without changing the actual files contents and having to worry about setting the editor up to insert the right amount of spaces.
I work in a massive project where they used both. Often in the same functions. Sometimes mixing 2 and 4 spaces aswell.
The real hot take: Spaces are better than tabs. Fight me
Spaces ARE better than tabs.
Tabs could be a good idea if their default size in most environments (and often not configurable) wasn't 8, which is terribly big.
What environment are you using that have tabs set to 8?
Honestly, I can't think of an environment that doesn't have 8-space tabs by default.
Interesting...
Every IDE and editor (gui and tui) I've used has always come preconfigured with a tab-size of 4.
The only thing I've ever experienced having a tab-size of 8 was github, and I thought that was just a problem with a setting from github's size that I quickly set back to 4.
It seems that tui editors come with tab-sizes of 8 only when a config isn't provided, and every environment I've used where I've used a tui editor has always come with sensible configs (for things like config location, language recognition for syntax highlighting, etc...) including a tab-size of 4.