Fatal flaw in D design which is holding back widespread adoption

[Lutger]

Jacob Carlborg wrote:

> On 3/31/10 03:53, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Steven Schveighoffer"<schveiguy at yahoo.com>  wrote in message
>> news:op.vaefb7p3eav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
>>> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:56:32 -0400, Walter Bright
>>> <newshound1 at digitalmars.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> BTW, type a file to a console window. Tabs come out as 8 characters, on
>>>> Windows, Linux, and OSX.
>>>
>>> So do 8 spaces.  This is the surest way to make code easily
>>> viewable/editable anywhere.  Just set the "expand tabs" option on your
>>> favorite editor.
>>>
>>> My recommendation is to say indentations are 4 spaces and tabs should not
>>> be used for indentation.
>>>
>>
>> I've always found using spaces for indentation to make editing a real
>> PITA. (Why woudn't I rather be able to move in/out one level of
>> indentation with one arrow-key press instead of 4 (or so) ?)
>>
>> But really, I don't see why the whole issue hasn't already been made 100%
>> personal style by a VCS that handles it the same way SVN handles EOLs. If
>> one person has problems involving another person using a different
>> indentation system, then at least one of them is doing something very
>> wrong. Seriously, how is it that this is 2010, we have things like syntax
>> highlighting as standard featutres in every editor that anyone ever
>> actually uses...and yet the whole world of programmers still can't
>> abstract away something as simple as f*cking tab sizes? Bah!
> 
> Eclipse with descent can reformat the files to your own personal
> preferences.

vote++

The descent reformatter is crazy, no matter how funky your style is the 
chances are pretty good you can autoformat all that pesky code written by 
others :) Not to mention you can use it as a tool to save time formatting 
yourself. I would perhaps even pay for it as a standalone utility /salestalk>