Subject: Re: 8-space indents considered harmful
To: None <bgrayson@netbsd.org>
From: Ignatios Souvatzis <ignatios@cs.uni-bonn.de>
List: tech-kern
Date: 01/25/2000 11:14:36
On Tue, Jan 25, 2000 at 12:52:35AM -0600, Brian C. Grayson wrote:
> 
>   One thing that would make all of this moot would be for someone
> to fix indent(1) so that it can KNF-ify code.  Or, change the def
> of KNF, as far as indents, to "what indent gives when fed
> /usr/share/misc/indent.pro".  Then, folks who like nonstandard
> indents could simply run the code through indent on every checkout,
> and re-run it with sw=8 (in vi-speak) before every checkin.  

Uhm... now, _this_ will definitely get my merciless opposition.

If you write code with 2- or 3- or 4-char indents in mind, you'll allow for
some structural ugl^H^H^Hproperties which will make it harder to read and
maintain, in my opinion.

This would be bad enough, but...

if you mechanically reformat said code to use 8-char indents, it will be
completely unreadable (maybe unless you use 250-char terminals. Did anybody
notice that newspaper colums use something like 35 to 40 chars maximum per
line?).

Regards,
	-is
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