[OT] Spaces/tabs (Was: simple display (from: GUI library for D))

[Nick Sabalausky]

""Jérôme M. Berger"" <jeberger at free.fr> wrote in message 
news:io2396$1nuo$1 at digitalmars.com...
>spir wrote:
>>
>> A drawback is one cannot directly have different indent levels, for
>> instance to indent collection contents more, or less, than blocks of
>> code. This can also be considered an advantage; and is simply solved by
>> using... spaces ;-)
>>
>> void f () {
>>  -> while (true) {
>>  ->  -> table = [
>>  ->  -> .."aaa" : 1,
>>  ->  -> .."bbb" : 2,
>>  ->  -> .."ccc" : 3,
>>  ->  -> ];
>>  ->  -> auto a = this(table);
>>  ->  -> if (! a) break;
>>  -> }
>> }
>>
>> (yes, the example is stupid)
>>
>Unfortunately, most editors are completely unable to handle this
>example properly: sure they will *display* it fine, but they will
>not allow you to *enter* it right (especially if you need more
>spaces for alignment than the tab size).
>

That's unfortunately true. I used to try to do that in cases like this:

if(blah)
{
->  foo(.bigLongArg1,
->  .....bigLongArg2,
->  .....bigLongArg3
->  );
}

But editors just choke on that like crazy. It's a pain to type it in that 
way, and then when you go back to edit (add another arg on another line, for 
instance), it just screws it all up again, likely without me even noticing 
right away. (And I even have most auto-formatting turned off.) I decided it 
was far more trouble than it was worth.

So I've changed my style to this:

if(blah)
{
->  foo(
->  ->  bigLongArg1,
->  ->  bigLongArg2,
->  ->  bigLongArg3
->  );
}

Much better. Of course, it would be even better still if Scintilla would be 
willing to add elastic tabstops (I'm getting increasingly annoyed that it 
doesn't, and that it doesn't even seem receptive to the idea, for technical 
reasons), because then I *could* do exactly what I used to with absolutely 
no problem:

if(blah)
{
->  foo(->bigLongArg1,
->  ->    bigLongArg2,
->  ->    bigLongArg3
->  );
}

And everything would always align properly.