On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 05:31:21PM -0700, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
For layout, the language designers probably need to fix the tab width to something, and eight is the standard. So everyone has to use eight when using layout, or else not use tabs. ...
There's an alternative viewpoint I was trying to suggest, but probably wasn't clear enough: tabs and spaces are incomparable, and it is an error to try to compare them. That is, the whitespace at the beginning of adjacent lines of layout has to be exactly the same, not just end up at the same goal column. Similarly, if line 2 is indented more than line 1, than the whitespace at the beginning of line 2 should start with the identical whitespace to line 1. This will still sometimes break from the user's point of view, but at least it breaks immediately and visibly, and would never break silently. --Dylan