[Haskell-i18n] Re: Tabs

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Sun, 25 Aug 2002 17:31:21 -0700, Ashley Yakeley <ashley@semantic.org> pisze:

> Two opposing viewpoints, that you should not use tabs in source code at 
> all --
> <http://adamspiers.org/computing/why_no_tabs.html>
> 
> ...and that you should tabs in source code, but only for indenting --
> <http://www.derkarl.org/why_to_tabs.html>

There are also two viewpoints about how to use tabs, if at all:

1. Tabs are always 8, use whatever indent you like (by using as much
   tabs as fit and then spaces).

2. Indent is always one tab, the width is unspecified.

An interesting fact is that each of these viewpoints works fine when
used consistently, but they conflict wich each other if mixed. That's
why people won't universally agree on that: for everybody his method
works fine internally, it becomes wrong when the other method comes.

> Linus Torvalds has another view, for his Unix kernel "Linux" source:
> 
>      "Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters."

Unfortunately C doesn't use as much nesting as functional languages
so this view is not well suited for Haskell and similar languages.

-- 
  __("<      Marcin Kowalczyk
  \__/     qrczak@knm.org.pl
   ^^    http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/