In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
I was trying to stay out of the fray but this one I feel I have to respond to:
This is why I use spaces. A space is a space everywhere, a tab depends too strongly on the editor. I’ve had too many times where I had to edit on a different machine and it transmogrified my tabs into a different non-character entity in a way that didn’t reveal itself until later.
I can kind of see your point if you’re speaking from a devops/sysadmin’s point of view (i.e. something that would require you to use default editors on the go on systems that you don’t necessarily have control over).
Other than that, a tab’s principal purpose is indentation. One tab is one level of indentation regardless of how it appears. If a tab gets transformed into something else, it sounds like a text encoding problem and indentation would then be just one of (and possibly the smallest of) several possible issues.
I’m speaking from a web dev’s point of view - I’m assuming that I’ll always have my own configured editor on hand and I’ll be able to tell it that one tab is N spaces, sometimes even differently for different file types in the same project. Worst that could happen is that I don’t have a specific configuration and the editor just falls back to the default until I set otherwise. Since I’m working in a team, using spaces for a source controlled project would mean that everyone has to use the same. Having tabs means that everyone can configure it for themselves (assuming editor configs don’t go in the repo).