Re: [Iverilog-devel] On Spaces and Tabs

[Larry D. <ldo...@re...>]

Steve -

On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 11:45:03AM -0800, Stephen Williams wrote:
> [chop] But I do insist that the code should be viewed
> the way the writer wrote it. In particular, it bothers me immensely
> when I see source code clearly written by a vi user with tabs set to
> 4. It's unreadable! Either do not use tab characters (i.e. leading
> spaces instead) or stick to the standard tab=8 and use tab followed
> by spaces to get the desired position.
> 
> I think the above pretty much rules out BusyBox coding style as I grasp
> them from this conversation since an 8-place tab for every indent would
> be hopelessly too deep for code with any nesting complexity.

There are two orthogonal answers for this:

1. Don't indent so deeply.

2. Set your tab=6.

> Expecting code format to survive viewers adjusting indent for
> personal taste is unrealistic.

Properly used, the busybox style looks fine no matter what
you set your tabstops to.  Don't take my word for it, open
up a recent copy of busybox and see how it looks.  Try it
with tab=4, tab=6, and tab=8.  Then re-read the busybox style
guide to see how it's done.

Specifically, the first file I looked at is coreutils/expand.c.
It gets up to about 6 indent levels, and mostly fits into
80 columns at tabs=8.  I'm sure Steve will like its look
better at tabs=6, and you can de-emphasize the nesting (and make
the longest line fit 80 columns) by setting tabs=2.  There are
a couple of places where spacing within the line is important,
and that's done with spaces: see the initial comment block, the
enum declaration of OPT_{INITIAL,TABS,ALL}, and the declarations
of {,un}expand_longopts[].

The point is kind of like original (pre-commercialization and
pre-web-designer) html concept: encode semantics in the document,
in this case by using a number of tabs to represent nesting level.
Presentation (physical spacing) is left up to the browser and
individual choice.

   - Larry