this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming

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What are your programming hot takes? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by 257m@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] Yearly1845@reddthat.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tabs are better than spaces

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year 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)
[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How long is a newline?

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Correct.

And a tab is the separator between stops.

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] spartanatreyu@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

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.