[Springframework-developer] Re: Formatting in the face of tab usage

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

Also, last fall when we discussed tab usage, we all agreed that there 
were issues sometimes with hard tab usage, but basically decided to 
leave things as-is for the time being, with it probably being revisited 
in the future. I would personally be very happy to switch to using a 
space-based (2 or 4 chars per indent level) indentation setup instead, 
to avoid the problems with hard tab usage. With hard tab usage, if 
people don't have discipline and start adding in spaces, it quickly 
breaks down.

Colin


Colin Sampaleanu wrote:

> I was looking at DefaultXmlBeanDefinitionParser, and it's clear that 
> whoever formatted it (Juergen I guess) is using an editor with hard 
> tabs set to 2 characters (not the more common 4 or 8). I say this 
> because for some method calls, the continuation line lines up method 
> args, but only if tabs are set to 2. If they are 4 or 8, the 
> continuation line is _way_ over to the right.
>
> While I'm not a big fan of hard tabs, as per our discussion last fall, 
> I can live with them. But what this means is that any continuation 
> lines need to be simply one or more tabs farther in than the line 
> before it. If you format lines so that you use hard tabs to line up 
> with some non-tab text in a line above, this will completely mess up 
> for other people using different tab settings. Ditto with adding some 
> real spaces (with or without tabs) at the beginning of the line. 
> Essentially _all_ indentation has to be based only on tabs.
>
> Colin
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