And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.
> You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.
In practice this is difficult; since the characters are invisible by default, people will inevitably mix up the two. Looks like the industry standard is to give up and use spaces everywhere, unless strict and mandatory tooling exists.
I am very much against any alignment with spaces, just not needed, and adding a lot of unnecessary complexity to code formatting. Just use tabs for indentation, and don't mix them with spaces.
You can't use spaces to align because you can't assume a monospaced font will always be used. You can't use tabs either for that matter. If you need structure, use the language's punctuation and line breaks.
You can use tabs, that’s exactly their role, but only in theory since in practice elastic tab stops that would work with proportional fonts aren’t implemented anywhere in code, only word processors
no, i can't. i want to be able to align on arbitrary columns, not on tab stops. and when i add or remove character that break the alignment, tabs mess everything up. spaces don't.
No, you can't do that with spaces because spaces have a fixed width, which can't always be aligned to a variable width column. Only in the primitive environment of fixed width fonts does this work, but even there the tabstops can also be placed at an arbitrary column position, check Word out
Sticking to historical limitations can be kind of silly. I used to have a computer with 40-column text display, and I don't feel any need to limit myself to that anymore.
honestly, spaces shouldn't be used; it's a design issue- use tabs only for indentation, then the language should ideally support not having to use spaces for manual alignment.
You use line feeds (\n) to instruct your teletype machine to feed in one more line of paper. Unless you're trying to argue that your text editor is a teletype machine, then line feeds are the wrong thing to use.
I think most people are pretty amenable to the argument that text editors are teletype machines.
Nobody cares that phone calls happen over fiber now instead of telephone lines. So, same should apply to teletype. Nobody is going to care you're reading this over fiber instead of a telephone line.
Now, people do care if they're trying to read a csv document and somebody didn't quote their commas within strings and now the values are in the wrong columns which could've been avoided by using tabs to store tabular data.
In practice this is difficult; since the characters are invisible by default, people will inevitably mix up the two. Looks like the industry standard is to give up and use spaces everywhere, unless strict and mandatory tooling exists.