Tab versus space indentation, and source code control systems... (was: Re: Style guide?)

[sur-behoffski <sur_behoffski@...>]

G'day,

Just briefly, one of the places I worked demanded spaces, and no tabs, for
indentation, as well as strictly no trailing whitespace.

The rationale was based around similar grounds to how Git tracks content
via hashes (SHA1, SHA-256, SHA3 or whatever): They wanted to have a
canonical way of representing whitespace within a file, regardless of the
developer, and spaces were chosen simply because they were the lowest
common denominator, and they didn't want to see changes based merely on
how an editor's settings, and/or a developer's typing, affected
whitespace.  The source code control system had hooks to enforce these
rules, and rejected any non-conforming text (written as Perl scripts, so
that it could be smart about exceptions such as Makefiles demanding to
have a tab character, etc.).

cheers,

sur-behoffski
Programmer, Grouse Software