[Pythonmac-SIG] Selecting in BBEdit & Python Indenting style(spaces)

[Louis Pecora]

Kent Quirk wrote:

>Just because there seems to be an orgy of people agreeing that Tabs are the One True Way, I feel a need to point out that there are those of us who fervently believe that Tabs Are Evil. The reason is that tabs are interpreted differently in different places, and they're indistinguishable from spaces upon casual inspection. So the visual appearance of mixed spaces and tabs can be highly misleading and confusing, especially in an environment with multiple developers, each of whom may have a different tab setting.
>
>Spaces are unambiguous. As it's the meaning of the source that matters, and editors can be tuned to personal taste, I'm in favor of leaving the source clean of tabs and letting people tweak their editors to their own liking.
>
>In my view, Python should consider leading tabs to be a syntax error (and yes, I know about the -tt switch).
>
>	Kent
>  
>

I'm not sure what you are talking about, but I meant that Tabs can be 
set in an editor (e.g. BBEdit) to _display_  at any number of spaces, 
but the editor does not put in real spaces.  It just displays the Tabs 
as indentations whose width you choose.  There's still only one 
character (a tab) there in the file.  Delete works properly.  That's 
pretty unambiguous to me.  So if someone else on your project likes to 
display using 8-space tabs and you like 2-space tabs it doesn't matter.  
You can look at his files and edit them back and forth and nothing gets 
confused.  Why is that so bad?

-- 
Cheers,

Lou Pecora

Code 6362
Naval Research Lab
Washington, DC  20375
USA
Ph:  +202-767-6002
email:  pecora at anvil.nrl.navy.mil