Stripping of whitespaces at the end of lines

[Geoff Thorpe]

On Wed, 29 May 2002 jon at siliconcircus.com wrote:

> On Wed, 29 May 2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
>
> > There no need to agree -- tabs are 8 spaces by definition. It's standard.
>
> There's no need to agree because everyone should be using hard tabs (ASCII
> 9, \t, whatever you want to call it).  Every editor on the face of the
> planet knows how to make these appear as however many spaces the user
> wants.  So I can see the code with indentation size 8, and you can see it
> with 4, or 2, or 160, or whatever.
>
> After the first non-whitespace character on a line, spaces should be used,
> since at that point, different numbers of hard tabs would be needed to get
> text on succeeding lines to be at the same column.
>
> Since I've never contributed to Wine, I'm perfectly happy if everyone
> ignores my opinion on this, but I felt the need to combat the insanity of
> using spaces for indentation :-)

Absolutely. If you use \t, then anyone looking at the code can choose the
size of indents. I *despise* space-based indenting, almost as much as I
despise mixed indenting (eg. 4-space indenting with every pair of 4-space
indents being converted into a single tab).

As you point out, a good discipline on the use of tabs does pretty much
cater to everyone's tastes. However you can't assume that using spaces
after the first non-whitespace character will ensure arbitrary column
alignment (eg. for end-of-line comments). At least not between lines that
have differing indentation.

Cheers,
Geoff