On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:00 PM, Thomas Martitz thomas.martitz@student.htw-berlin.de wrote:
Any tab+space will be broken if the user choses another tab width that the author did.
That is false. The point of "space for alignment" in the "tab for indentation, space for alignment" style is that the spaces will be there to maintain alignment. For some styles of alignment, the alignment will remain intact regardless of the tab width.
I especially see this in SQL, where some people like to *right*-justify the keywords, and of course the keywords are different lengths.
Personally, I don't use this style, but some people find it MUCH easier to read. Of course, you can also achieve this using spaces only, but that is not your statement. The fact is, adjusting the tab width will NOT ruin the alignment in this scheme.
If you are thinking of "use as many tabs as possible, then switch to spaces", that is something else. In the tab-for-indent scheme being discussed, if your code is at "indent level 1", you will have one tab, and then anything that needs to be aligned after that is spaces, even if it is 50 spaces.
John