[Haskell-cafe] Indentation woes

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Aug 1, 2007, at 10:05 , david48 wrote:

> On the topic of indenting, it would be nice if there was a way to tell
> the compiler the size of the tab characters.
>
> The way it is now, I have to use space characters to indent.

The problem with that is, while there's a standard for the width of a  
tab on Unix, there isn't on Windows.  It's really only safe to use  
spaces for indentation.

Thus, it's better to use an editor which converts tabs to spaces in a  
specified manner, so you can use whatever tabs you're comfortable  
with (or none; Emacs generally uses tab to mean "indent  
appropriately") but the resulting file uses spaces and will behave  
reliably anywhere.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH