Re: A question on coding conventions

[Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>]

Hi,

On Sat, 26 Mar 2011, Levon Haykazyan wrote:

> I was trying to configure vim to work better with gcc coding 
> conventions. When I set 'tab' symbol to be interpreted as 2 spaces, I 
> noticed that a lot of formatting in e.g. gcc/cp/parser.c was gone.

Yeah, never change tabstop, change shiftwidth instead.  I'm using these 
for vim:

set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=8
set cindent
set cinoptions={.5s,g0,p5,t0,(0,^-0.5s,n-0.5s

(similar results can be achieved with sw=2 and adjustments to the 
options, but for some reason I like to think of the GNU conventions to 
be based on a base indentation of 4 positions with some extra rules 
where only half indentations are used)

> A bit of research showed that in a lot of places 'tab' was used for 8 
> spaces. I've looked in gcc and gnu coding conventions but didn't find 
> anything about this. So my question is whether such usage of 'tab' 
> symbol is recommended by coding conventions or 8 spaces should be used 
> instead.

Given an indentation of N positions we use N/8 tabs and N%8 spaces, yes.
(some authors use only spaces, so that's not a hard rule, but never 
write your code with tabstops set to anything else than 8).


Ciao,
Michael.