Re: [pygame] Spaces And Tabs Pointlessly Time-Wasting Religious Schism

[James Paige <Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo, the LORD looked upon the grave sins of the evil tabbites, and 
through the prophet James, he called upon the the wise and peaceful 
fourspacians to take up plowshares and text editors and to hammer them 
into swords, and to fall upon the wicked tabbites and rend them asunder 
with vicious bloody smiting. And when the deed had been done, the LORD 
looked down and spake "so it shall be for now and for always, the 
fourspacians shall import and subclass over all the earth". But a 
certain fourspacian indented his code with only two spaces, and was 
well-pleased with himself, saying "what I have done is good, and will 
please the LORD", and so the twospacians were born, and they strove 
against the fourspacians, and chaos continued in the lands of pythonia.

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 08:58:10AM -0700, Bill Coderre wrote:
> 
> With no disrespect to either my exceedingly learned colleagues from  
> Lilliput who use spaces, or my sublimely enlightened colleagues from  
> Blefuscu who use tabs[1], this is Yet Another Pointlessly Time-Wasting  
> Religious Schism.[2]
> 
> The only problem is that our computers, which can be so lightning-fast  
> at replacing characters, cannot seem, even at this late date in their  
> evolution, to figure out when two lines are similarly indented and  
> therefore execute our code without complaint. Their text-editing  
> programs are only confounding the matter.
> 
> My meager solution has been to turn on an option that displays a faint  
> glyph representing each tab. Therefore, when I open a file, I somewhat  
> subliminally see which lines have an indenting problem, and I fix them.
> 
> Perhaps a better solution would be to agree on a spaces-tabs exchange  
> rates, but this, also has its zealots. Some people use a tab to mean  
> eight spaces, some four, and some two.
> 
> Is there some unix magic cookie format to explicate this exchange  
> rate? If so, then the battle is mostly won, and we "merely" have to  
> convince the myriad text editors to publish, honor, and obey the  
> cookies, silently sorting out the indentations and replacing whichever  
> with whatever.
> 
> If not, we "just" have to add the cookie format to Python's spec.
> 
> [1]  cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Etymology
> [2] See also Endianness, above, Emacs versus vi, "brackets on new  
> lines," etc.
> 
>