Tabs and spaces (style)

[Ken Seehof]

Most people seem to be using spaces only, with indentation of 4.
This is popular for those of us with a real code editor.

"All tabs" is the next most popular, especially for people writing
python on a Kaypro. :-)

Hey Guido, please change your style guide ok?  Mixing tabs
and spaces is lame, and fortunately nobody does it anyway :-)

Here's some data:

spc  tab  gvr  nmix
102   32   0   8   c:\python20\lib
  1   15    0    0  ...\Pythonwin\pywin\framework
  2    8    0    0   ...\Pythonwin\pywin\scintilla
31    0    0    0   C:\Python20\wxPython
  2    7    0    0  C:\Python20\win32\demos
  1    5    0    6  C:\Python20\win32com\client
 23    0    0    0  C:\Python20\_xmlplus\dom
  2   17    0    0  D:\qp\WebQ\QServer\medusa
  5    0    0    0  C:\Python20\Orchard-python-0.3.1\Orchard
  8    1    1*    2  C:\Python20\OpenGL\Demo\srenner
  8    3    0    2  C:\Python20\OpenGL\Demo\tom
 44    1    0    1  C:\Python20\Tools\idle

spc = uses spaces only (usually 4 spaces)
tab = uses tabs only
gvr = uses Guidos suggested tab8+space4 combo
nmix = mixes tabs and spaces sloppily (at least 3 lines of each)

(* actually, on inspection, trees.py is a sloppy mix of
spaces and tabs, not gvr style.)

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Copyright (c) 2001 by Ken Seehof
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Alex Martelli says:
> "Cantanker" <az at cantanker.net.nospam> wrote in message
> news:Y4AH6.28530$ff.208353 at news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> > What is the consensus about mixing tabs and spaces in a Python script?
>
> I don't think there is one.  Guido's style guide recommends using both,
> with a tabsize of 8, so I expect most Pythonistas follow that style.

Fortunately most Pythonistas do not follow that style. :-)

> Yet, for what it counts, I personally prefer setting my editors to always
> save with spaces only (so _all_ tools will certainly see my source in just
> the same way:-) and curse every time somebody posts code using tabs
> (which some newsreading software hides completely from me)...

Yay.  Most Pythonistas follow your style.

> Guido suggests that conversion to all-spaces (useful when a Windows
> platform is involved) can be done upon transfer of the source to that
> platform.  But that doesn't cover all cases in which transformation tools
> may not, or definitely WILL not, be involved, such as disks being shared
> via Samba or NFS between heterogeneous platforms, sources that are
> zipped or tgz'd and the zipfile or tarball put up for download, etc.  It
> seems to me that spaces-only is the only really cross-platform approach.
>
> Alex

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