[MercurialBlue]

From Araq on Nim Forums:

> I decided to make Nim "space only" after having read an interview with Guido van Rossum who said that it is what he would do for Python if he were to decide it again. Also, and more importantly, back then I had never seen "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" applied correctly once. In fact, "compress 8 spaces into a tab" was quite common. (This is not the same as "tabs for indentation"!)

In other words, it seems Nim simply attempts to learn from Python's mistakes (even PEP8 discourages the use of tabs for new projects), mixing tabs with spaces brings several potential technical issues for a whitespace-sensitive language, so why not just sidestep that problem entirely?

[jdrek1]

Guido van Rossum also seems to prefer tabs but was held back by the community [1]. But even if he changed his mind since then those reasons are incredibly weak if you ask me, they basically boil down to "some software 50 years ago was pure shit" and that's not a valid reason. Tabs are simply the superior/right tool for indentation. You might want to see a tab 8 chars wide and I want 4 but we both see the loop body indented one level. With spaces enforced one of us would not see the code as they'd like it to be and while that might seem like pure preference on surface the simple truth is that preferences matter (see the recent thread about the ideal font for reading speed - it's different for everyone) and tabs provide the freedom while spaces don't. And in some cases they matter even more, for example I've worked with someone who was visually impaired and pretty much needed a tab size of 0 to be able to work, he wouldn't be able to do that with spaces.

The only argument that ever comes from spaces people is "alignment" and while I personally think that most if not all of the things people try to align don't get any benefit from that alignment whatsoever nobody advoces for tabs only, you can still always use spaces if you really really really need to align something. Some people messing that up is really not a reason to straightup ban the superior way, you could just train those people better. If you want to align stuff, go ahead. The thing that matters is that if I don't care about your alignment while you do and we both have different tab width preferences then with tabs we both get what we want while with spaces only you would.

Also while this was mostly about tabs vs spaces, those are not the only aspects of a style and the main point was that an enforced style will always upset some people. People simply work differently and intentionally preventing them from using whatever they like is pretty close to malicious if you ask me and in the best case still disrespectful. Some people work better in light mode, some prefer a complete rainbow IDE, some prefer to use raw vi, etc. Or for a better analogy, maybe someone codes much better while listening to loud death metal or whatever. Obviously in an office that would annoy other people but the solution is not to ban developers from listening to music completely but rather to make them use headphones in such cases so that other people are not affected. For code style I might work better with a certain one and you with a different style and that's okay, we just come up with some compromise style that the code is converted to before committing. Languages that enforce a certain style simply don't have this freedom.

Now in whitespace sensitive languages like Python if (and only if) you want to align stuff then yeah things can go boom. But it also is not an unsolvable problem, if the code is all spaces then it just works, if the code is all tabs with no "alignment" then it just works, and if you use tabs with some spaces because you want aligned stuff that can pretty much be checked by the parser. Error if a space is found before a tab, error if a line has more than one tab more than the previous one, etc. I don't think sidestepping this problem is worth alienating people.

[1] https://legacy.python.org/search/hypermail/python-1994q2/020...