The D Style and tab sizes

[Sean Kelly]

Regan Heath wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:13:11 -0700, Walter Bright 
> <newshound at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>> Thomas Kuehne wrote:
>>> Walter Bright schrieb am 2006-09-10:
>>>> Stewart Gordon wrote:
>>>>> AFAIC, people who use tabs but indent by half a tab at a time are 
>>>>> painting themselves into a corner.  We should aim to write code 
>>>>> that'll be readable in any editor, whatever its tab size setting.
>>>> There's no way to do that and have hard tabs. The only way to 
>>>> achieve that is by using spaces only. Using spaces only is one way 
>>>> to conform to the D style guide.
>>>  What editor/IDE are you using?
>>>  gedit(GNOME), kedit(KDE) and vi/nano(shell) are all basic editors and
>>> all have a way to set the display with of "\t" characters. Microsoft's
>>> Notepad is probably the only default editor incapable of changing the
>>> display with of "\t".
>>
>> That's true, but is not the problem. Consider:
>>
>>     foo();             // comment
>>     bar + 4 *18 - foo();    // comment
>>
>> Suppose \t's are used to line up the comments.
> 
> That's where the mistake/error has been made, NEVER use \t to line text 
> up, ALWAYS use space.
> 
> Tabs are for indentation only, or in other words, indenting the text 
> essentially defining your left hand margin, nothing else!
> 
> As long as you only use tabs to indent the left hand margin, and spaces 
> to align text people can use any tab size they like and it will always 
> work perfectly.

Try viewing Walter's code with a tab width of less than 8.  Since his 
indentation depth (4 chars) is less than the hard tab width, functions 
typically look like this:

void fn()
{
int x;
for(;;)
{
     blah blah;
}
}

I thought this was actually a deliberate indenting style until I changed 
my tab width to 8 and suddenly most of the code became properly indented 
(I say most because some places are indented with all spaces instead of 
tabs--probably from submitted patches).


Sean