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What are your programming hot takes? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Tabs are literally designed for aligned indentation, and they're configurable for clientside viewing. There is no excuse for spaces. I don't care if your goddang function arguments line up once they spill out onto another line. You've got deeper problems.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Tabs are designed for tabulation (hence the name), not indentation. The side effect is that a tab's length changes based on its position in a line, which is terrible for programming. If you use tabs in the Python REPL, it looks like this:

    >>> def frobnicate_all(arr):
>>>     for item in arr:
>>>             frobnicate(item)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    How long is a newline?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    A newline is the separator between lines, so the concept of length doesn't make sense for it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Correct.

    And a tab is the separator between stops.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Indeed. It's a separator, so using it for indentation doesn't make sense.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Stops are indentation.

    They're what you indent... to.

    Tab goes to the next stop, the same way newline goes to the next line. Exactly the same way. If you write more text before the next line, the amount of whitespace shrinks. That doesn't mean the "length" of a newline changes. It always goes one line.

    A tab always goes one stop.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    a tab’s length changes based on its position in a line

    What does this even mean? A tab is a tab.

    Tab's don't have multiple lengths inside a file, they all have the same length.

    That's the point of tabs.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The horizontal tabulation character moves the cursor to the next column which is a multiple of the tabulation length. See the examples here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key

    At least for me, it renders like this:

    Screenshot of a part of the linked Wikipedia page

    Clearly the whitespace produced by each tab character has a different length.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The horizontal tabulation character moves the cursor to the next column which is a multiple of the tabulation length. See the examples here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key

    Yes

    Clearly the whitespace produced by each tab character has a different length.

    No, each tab has the same size, the text rendered over the top of the tabs are not the same size.

    Always remember the golden rule: Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.

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