tabs do WHAT?

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ "Dirk-Ulrich Heise" <hei at adtranzsig.de>:

| Thomas Hamelryck schrieb in Nachricht <86h5ep$iq$1 at mach.vub.ac.be>...
| >People here (including Guido Himself) get extremely picky when the
| >use of indentation is criticised.
| 
| Go into a C++ newsgroup and suggest they get rid of the curlys.
| Or go into a Lisp group and tell them you love Lisp to death
| except for the brackets.
| I think you'll harvest some responses like "Go away and use a
| different language." What do you expect?

Perhaps more to the point, a good editor is absolutely essential with
almost any modern language.  Lisp is truly a pain without a good
editor.  With a good one, like emacs, I not only get the editor to
show me mathcing parentheses, but it can indent any program fragment
automatically, immediately highlighting any mistake in the parentheses
by creating an indentation different from what I thought the program
structure was like.  Likewise, in python, I never use the space bar
for indentation; emacs (or IDLE, now that I started using it) does it
for me.  The editor also has features for indenting or outdenting
blocks of code to the appropriate level for those circumstances when
you change the structure of the code or copy blocks of code from one
place to another place with a different indentation leve.  Use these
features, and all concerns about the unfriendliness of this or that
indentation scheme, parentheses or curly brackets etc melt away like
icicles in the sun.
-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- "There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words
   a wonderful obstruction to the mind."  - Francis Bacon