Re: [BBC] Programmers who use spaces 'paid more'

[Robert Eachus <rieachus@comcast.net>]

On Wednesday, June 21, 2017 at 8:27:56 AM UTC-4, Simon Wright wrote:

> Dead simple: use the TAB key to tell the editor to align the 
> current/selected lines appropriately; and leave the editor to decide 
> whether to use tab characters (C-I) to implement the indent or just 
> spaces. 

> I agree that you have a problem if your project standards require some 
> weird setting, but it's still a question of customising the editor. 

I'm trying to remember whether I first used untabify in Emacs, but it was sometime in the 1960s.  Untabify doesn't change the appearance of code if the tabs in Emacs match the settings on your display device.  But there are no tabs left in the source file.  If you were programming in a language where tabs in (the code portion of)  source files could make for hours of work, it was a real time saver. (Oh, and you set your tab key to insert three spaces if that was what you wanted.)

A few years later I was working on projects where the checked in files used the project standard.  If you opened one of the files in an editor?  The pretty printer would use your settings.  If you checked the file back in after changes, the first step was to run it through the pretty printer with no errors.  (The stuff that the pretty printer could fix would be fixed automatically.  But if you added access to a library file which was not supposed to be used here?  Bad programmer, no cookie. ;-)