Larry Wall's comment on python...

[Greg Ewing]

Courageous wrote:

> In practice, of course, the developer in question will
> very likely strike the tab key to get as far as they can to the first
> element of the second line.


I'm always very aware of the issue when working
on my own code, but I take your point that others
may not be so careful. I usually convert to all-spaces
before giving my code to anyone else.

By the way, I never write function calls that way.
I would write it as

   <tab><tab>def long_function_name(argument1,argument2,
   <tab><tab><tab>argument3,argument4):

mainly because I think it looks less ugly and doesn't
waste so much horizontal space, but it also has the
benefit of being less prone to tab/space screwups.

On the other hand, I do often line things up in
comments, e.g.

   class Spam:
   <tab>#  Instance variables:
   <tab>#    amount    integer
   <tab>#    flavour   string

and I'm careful to always use tabs-only before the
# and spaces-only after it.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg