Re: spaces before tabs (yuck!)

[Kendall Shaw <kshaw@kendallshaw.com>]

On 11/04/2015 08:14 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> It is causing confusion and extra work for everyone in the future
>> to use a tab character in a text file. It is anti-social
>> behavior.
> The flip side is that using anything but a width of 8 columns to
> represent TABs is causing confusion and is anti-social behavior.

There are issues of priority independent of issues of
severity. If you only ever consider severity, some problems will
never be addressed.

Tabs are a minor priority medium severity issue. In
other words, it's not something to "worry" about, like data loss
would be. But, it does have long lasting fairly severe
implications.

For source code in particular, it is a recurring topic that
source code may need to be maintained by someone other than the
author and that time extends past the limits of one's attention
span, meaning that even the author of some lines of text can face
the same problem interpreting the lines of text as other people
after some period of time. So, people discuss social conventions
as an invitation to cooperation.

This is an instance of that recurring topic.

People's setting for tab width representation is not an analogous
flip-side to the argument.

It is like the difference between suggesting neighbors not make
loud noises at 4 in the morning vs. suggesting that neighbors
wear ear plugs so that people can be free to make loud noises at
4 in the morning.

Regarding using or not using tab characters, you can't force
people to do either, and it's not suggested usually that that
would be an option.

 From the perspective of an open source or free software community
based on cooperation, as a suggestion for how to cooperate,
people can offer a convenience to others by not using tab
characters.

When people don't take the suggestion, the situation is as it is
now. Things are made no worse.

When people do take the suggestion, the situation is made
minimally better, as not throwing garbage out one's car window
makes things minimally better.

By comparison, suggesting that everyone set tab width to 8
characters and favoring the existence of tab characters in text
files, is not analogous.

When people don't take the suggestion, confusion resulting from
tab characters continues. Things are made slightly worse because
introducing confusion is promoted.

When people do take the suggestion, confusion resulting from tab
characters continues. Things are made slightly worse because
introducing confusion is promoted.

Kendall