On Thursday 23 October 2008, Vincent Hanquez wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 12:01:00PM +0100, Hugo Ferreira wrote:
> > Thomas Gazagnaire wrote:
> >> I would prefer to not have an editor which modify completely the file I
> >> am working on (ie. automatically replace tab by spaces). When working
> >> on big project, you cannot assume that everybody use spaces-based
> >> editor, and you still want to minimize the diff size of your patches.
> >
> > That is the whole issue. If you work in a big project wherein everyone
> > can you use their own "tab length", maintaining consistent indentation
> > is difficult (if not impossible). As Romain Bardou pointed out, you
> > can even use the same editors with differing "tab length". Real messy.
>
> tab has no length. projects tab-indented (not talking about alignment
> here), is the only consistant choice that permit everyone in this same
> project to use any *representation* they want for their indentation (8
> spaces, 2 spaces, 4 spaces, 11 spaces, ...) without making a mess.

Exactly, and that's why indentation in-between statements/expressions
can use tabs with arbitrary length, but indentation within statements/
expressions (split between lines) has to copy previous line's indentation
up to the starting column, and then use solely spaces. Same goes for 
indentation of comments that follow a non-blank line (can only use spaces).
There are several orthogonal issues here, all are well known, so please let's
not prolong this thread ;)

Cheers, Kuba