[erlang-questions] Controversial subject of the day: tabs and spaces for indentation

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 9:21 PM, kraythe . <kraythe@REDACTED> wrote:
> Actually the solution to this age old debate was proposed to me by a friend
> of mine and its genius on a number of levels but isn't implemented anywhere.
> The reality is that for most languages whitespace is irrelevant so it
> shouldn't be the code holding the indentation but the user's preference
> file. Imagine a source code repository where there is NO irrelevant
> whitespace in the code base. For java, for example, there would be literally
> only one single line of code. Now when you check out you have a preference
> file that says you want tabs or spaces or mixed and also defines the other
> formatting you prefer. When you check out the system reformats the code
> according to your specs dynamically. When you commit, it strips your code of
> whitespace before comparing.

Absolutely, this would fix it. But we don't have tools that can handle
that yet and I fear that implementing those and convincing people to
use them would take longer than agreeing on a saner alternative for
whitespace.

regards,
Vlad


> Now that would rock. Not just for tabs but the other code holy wars like
> drop braces and so onl
>
> Robert Simmons Jr. MSc. - Lead Java Architect @ EA
> Author of: Hardcore Java (2003) and Maintainable Java (2012)
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/robert-simmons/40/852/a39
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 2:21 PM, kraythe . <kraythe@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>> Actually the solution to this age old debate was proposed to me by a
>> friend of mine and its genius on a number of levels but isn't implemented
>> anywhere.  The reality is that for most languages whitespace is irrelevant
>> so it shouldn't be the code holding the indentation but the user's
>> preference file. Imagine a source code repository where there is NO
>> irrelevant whitespace in the code base. For java, for example, there would
>> be literally only one single line of code. Now when you check out you have a
>> preference file that says you want tabs or spaces or mixed and also defines
>> the other formatting you prefer. When you check out the system reformats the
>> code according to your specs dynamically. When you commit, it strips your
>> code of whitespace before comparing.
>>
>> Now that would rock. Not just for tabs but the other code holy wars like
>> drop braces and so onl
>>
>> Robert Simmons Jr. MSc. - Lead Java Architect @ EA
>> Author of: Hardcore Java (2003) and Maintainable Java (2012)
>> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/robert-simmons/40/852/a39
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Vlad Dumitrescu <vladdu55@REDACTED>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 8:27 PM, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED> wrote:
>>> > On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Vlad Dumitrescu <vladdu55@REDACTED>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >> On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 8:18 PM, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED> wrote:
>>> >>> It seems to me that this problem is easily solved by inverting the
>>> >>> interests:
>>> >>> - Fix erlang-mode to default to all spaces
>>> >>> - OTP team includes the appropriate Emacs code headers in the source
>>> >>> files (or the dot file in the source root directory as Magnus just
>>> >>> pointed out) and leave them horribly formatted, per their preference
>>> >>>
>>> >>> Does this not trivially solve the world's Erlang indent problems?
>>> >>
>>> >> Unfortunately, no. If I make a patch without emacs, my editor will
>>> >> still use something else than a mix of tabs and spaces, so it will
>>> >> have to be OTP-ified by hand (copying indentation from other lines) or
>>> >> by running it through emacs just for that.
>>> >>
>>> >> Which, in a funny turn of events, brings me to a question related to
>>> >> the previous "holy war": can emacs open, reindent and save files in
>>> >> bach mode? That would indeed help! (even if one would still have to
>>> >> install emacs).
>>> >
>>> > This seems like a problem that can be confined to the OTP team and
>>> > process, which is I think is a pretty small subset of all erlang-mode
>>> > users, no? And changing erlang-mode to default to spaces doesn't make
>>> > this worse does it?
>>>
>>> You are right, it's better like you suggested and definitely a step in
>>> the right direction. But I think that most Erlang projects are more
>>> lenient regarding whitespace mismatches in patches (being much
>>> smaller) and thus the project where it hurts the most to be
>>> non-compliant is not going to be affected. Yet.
>>>
>>> /Vlad
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> erlang-questions mailing list
>>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
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>>
>>
>
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