Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 01:38:12 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: grog@lemis.com Cc: keramida@ceid.upatras.gr, fullermd@futuresouth.com (Matthew D. Fuller), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Pico, indentation (was: Re: The 3.4-STABLE sources ...) Message-ID: <200001220138.SAA25380@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20000121224739.J918@mojave.worldwide.lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at Jan 21, 2000 10:47:39 PM
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> I think both these statements miss the obvious point: clarity of style > depends on the medium available. style(9) still uses an IBM 029 card > punch with an 8 step tab on the program drum. This makes it difficult > to express yourself clearly. Works great on my old HeathKit terminal with hard wired, unprogrammable 8 character tab stops. If you are concerned about space, use real tabs. If you are concerned about format, then make your editor only put in real tabs on 8 column boundaries, and have the tab key output however many spaces you want it to, converting sequences of 8 spaces preceeding an 8 column modular boundary to tabs, retroactively. BTW, "vi" can do this trivially by choosing the right settings, though if you believed it were: set tabstop=2 set hardtabs=8 set shiftwidth=2 then out would be wrong; instead you have to be tricky, e.g.: set shiftwidth=2 set tabstop=8 And then mapping the tab key to <control>T (exercise left to the student... hint: it involves at least one shell escape... ;-)). Realize that the tab key on computer terminals was invented for columnar sensitive languages, like FORTRAN and COBOL and some of the original varieties of BASIC, etc.. The typewriter usage of the tab key only crept in later, when word processing was invented. If you want to word process, then do it. If you want to write code, do that. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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