Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Python style (Was: equery refactorization)

[Douglas Anderson]

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o> wrote:
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> Michael A. Smith wrote:
>> Actually I don't like spaces for indentation at all. A tab character and a
>> space character take the same number of bytes, so it takes two-to-eight
>> times
>> as much space per indentation to store the same indentation as a single tab
>> character. On the average project that can add up to several kilobytes of
>> difference. Furthermore, it completely _prevents_ collaborators from
>> enjoying a
>> bit of customization as to the amount of indentation. If I like my
>> indentation
>> to be two spaces, and you like yours to be four, then we can each set
>> our text
>> editors that way and continue to happily share code that uses tabs for
>> indentation.
>>
>> I disagree with both PEP8 and Gentoo SOC styles on the matter. I would
>> love it
>> if someone could explain to me the actual benefit of using spaces over
>> tabs.
>
> FWIW, I feel the same way.
>
> - --
> Thanks,
> Zac
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>

Again, not starting a holy war here, I'm happy using tabs as that's
what people want, but you asked why most Python people prefer spaces,
and one of the reasons is that it's considered Pythonic to match the
indentation level of an opening parenthesis, for example:

http://rafb.net/p/SHb5sC97.html

With tabs you can't do that faithfully. And yes tabs do use less
space, but at the expense of readability. Stripping doc string out
would also use less space. As PEP 20 says, readability counts. As
Python is largely reliant on indentation for meaning in code, spaces
work well in python where they're not necessary in, say, bash. That's
just MHO.

-Doug