Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> In article <3e36e7c9@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:
>>  I don't understand how this "beautifies" the code. If anything, it only
>>causes problems.
> 
> All official POV-Ray editors support tabs properly.  Only some people in the
> terminal world seem to prefer outdated editors without proper tab support.
> Those people need to realize that they are running software that has been
> outdated for two decades and that they should really move on.  Tabs are the
> future, spaces are a thing of the past many here don't even remember because
> they could neither read or write back then...

Tabs do indeed cause problems in some cases.

For example, I use different tab sizes for different
kinds of source files, like size 4 for perl, size 2 for
python and size 8 for others.  These files won't look
very good when loaded into some other (or someone else's)
editor or viewer if I used "real" tabs!

That's just one reason why I'd never use "real tabs" in
*any* editor.

And, the editors I know of handle spaces a lot better!
This includes the povray editor, which IMHO isn't a good
text editor anyway - it's functionality is quite limited.
It can't trim trailing spaces AFAIK, and I hate that mix-
ture of spaces and tabs I'd get after editing a file for
a while, as spaces are never replaced by tabs automatically.
Upon indenting text, another tab is just inserted at the
beginning of the line, and if auto-indentation is on, the
whole indent is copied from the previous line (including
whatever combination of tabs and spaces there are).

(So much about outdated software.. I grew up with emacs
and vi, and they both could (and still can) handle both
spaces and tabs excellently! - Though I don't know if
it was those you had in mind.. ;)

I can't really see one single reason to use tabs in plain
text files. - It would be a completely different story if
you used variable width fonts (or even a word processor;
but then, tabs are handled in a different fashion anyway).

Spaces are unambiguous.


g.

-- 
mailto:gim### [at] psicoch
http://www.psico.ch/ 
http://psico.servehttp.com/

Post a reply to this message