this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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I don’t understand why this is such a big deal for anyone. With all the UI utilities available it would be incredibly easy to have a setting to interpret 5 consecutive spaces as a tab or a tab as 5 consecutive spaces and just let whoever prefers what to choose how they are going to interface with the code. Hell, you could even make it so 5 is the default and have custom consecutive values as an advanced option in the interpreter for edge cases. So many incredibly more challenging issues have been resolved in IDEs, I just don’t get it.
5!?!? Are you trying to get yourself sectioned?
You've obviously never opened a document (with tabs) where your IDE setting doesn't match what the author used. It looks like shit. Spaces are never, ever, misinterpreted. Tabs are. If your experience in viewing a document depends on a setting that the author had in their IDE, then it is a failure. This is why .PDF files are so ubiquitous, it doesn't matter if you created it in Microsoft Word with a uniform tab setting, or TEX in a console, it looks the same to the reader. If you cannot guarantee that the reader sees your source files as you see them, then you have failed. Full stop. Tabs should be cast into the dust bin as an archaic pre-optimization that failed in the real world.
Reading a tab as however many spaces is trivial, and the point of tabs.
Reading however many spaces as a tab is a gross hack that has to be dialed-in for whatever standard the document chose.
Just use tabs in the first place. God damn. That's what they're for.
I’m on team tab 100% I guess I was saying if someone felt they had to use spaces then they shouldn’t handicap everyone else because of their choice and an interpreter could normalize their code.