Re: OT - trivial programming language

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

Derrick 'dman' Hudson <dman@dman13.dyndns.org> writes:

> If tabs and spaces are combined for indentation purposes, then when
> you change your tab display width you will see a horrid mess of
> incorrectly indented code.

This is often, but not always the case.  I explained how tabs and
spaces are combined so that changing the tab display width will avoid
a horrid mess of incorrectly indented code.

To wit, consider this piece of code, based on tab width = 4:

for(;;) {
    if (a == b) {
        some_long_function_name(a,
                                b);
    }
}

I used spaces only in this message, please pretend that my style of
mixing tabs and spaces was used.  Changing tab display width to 8
will then produce this:

for(;;) {
        if (a == b) {
                some_long_function_name(a,
                                        b);
        }
}

Changing it to 2 will produce this:

for(;;) {
  if (a == b) {
    some_long_function_name(a,
                            b);
  }
}

Now, you may like some of them better than others, but clearly none of
them is a mess.  Each of them looks as you would expect from the
tab width setting.

Kai