When most Haskellers say tab width, they're colloquially referring to
how many literal spaces each "indent" action should be.
That is the case here as well. Most Haskellers I know do not use tabs
at all to avoid indent issues, unlike Golang which is exclusively
tabs.
On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 10:56 PM, Richard A. O'Keefe
On 30/08/16 6:09 AM, Christopher Done wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm trying to get a feel for the modern Haskell community's opinion on default tab-width for HIndent. Here is a link to the online poll:
http://doodle.com/poll/82xf854t9mmuv22h#table
Quote:
For the HIndent tool we'd like to choose the standard tab width. For now, it is 4, the width set by the Johan Tibell style guide. A survey of 1000 top-downloaded packages on Hackage reveals about 50-50 either way:https://gist.github.com/chrisdone/e3d1796d8f5df717b91db54aae36c440 HIndent is meant as a "community standard" tool; it should reflect the community's actual practice. If there's a clear preference for 2, we'll switch to that. Otherwise, we remain with 4.
There seems to be some confusion here. The Johan Tibell style guide does NOT "set" "the standard tab width" to 4. Far from it! The guide says plainly "TABS ARE ILLEGAL".
What the style guide talks about is INDENTATION steps. Not tab width!
When it comes to TAB width, the Haskell 2010 report is explicit and unambiguous, leaving no room for anyone's preferences. Chapter 10 says
The "indentation" of a lexeme is the column number of the first character of that lexeme; the indentation of a line is the indentation of its leftmost lexeme. To determine the column number, assume a fixed- width font with the following conventions: * The characters newline, return, linefeed, and formfeed, all start a new line. * The first column is designated column 1, not 0. * TAB STOPS ARE 8 CHARACTERS APART. * A tab character causes the insertion of enough spaces to align the current position with the next tab stop.
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