Re: gcc: cleaning up top level config

[kaih at khms dot westfalen dot de (Kai Henningsen)]

rra@stanford.edu (Russ Allbery)  wrote on 15.11.02 in <yl8yzuo1zm.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu>:

> Kai Henningsen <kaih@khms.westfalen.de> writes:
> > alexr@spies.com (Alex Rosenberg) wrote on 12.11.02:
>
> >> about the fact that MPW is built around the microcomputer concept that an
> >> indent level is always equal to a tab, yet ya'll are still stuck with 8
> >> character tabs thanks to some dumb terminal nobody can even name anymore
> >> and you have rigid formatting rules that pretty much require the use of
> >> emacs?
>
> > All I can say is, huh?!
>
> To clarify what I *think* Alex is talking about, I believe most people
> coding for GCC use space compression with tabs (replacing any aligned
> sequence of eight spaces with an ASCII TAB), but in a quick perusal of the
> GCC and GNU coding standards, I don't see any requirement for that.

Well, I seem to remember (but as I said, it's been ages) that there was  
some tool which could expand those tabs to whatever width you wanted -  
and, for that matter, you can certainly configure MPW, on a per-file  
basis, how large you want your tabs to be, and back then I did exactly  
that.

But I also had a port of GNU indent.

MPW, for the people who haven't seen it, is sort of like Emacs with libc  
and a shell built in, but with only shell script instead of Elisp and  
without system() in any of its many variations, instead using binary  
"tools" for many extensions (but often wrapped with big loads of scripts).  
And of course, both gratuituously different and comes with suggestions for  
aliases to hide those differences somewhat.

> I personally agree wholeheartedly with jwz on that count:
>
>     <http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html>
>
> I'd be very happy if I never saw another ASCII TAB character again.

I don't have strong feelings myself - what works is a matter of the  
environment. That includes all of jwz's points.

I do, however, dislike 4 column indentation. Either 2 or 8 ("small" or  
"large") are acceptable, but 4 (or 3, I've also seen that - or, I just  
remembered, 1, I think I've seen that in Wirth source) are just irritating  
(look like indenting mistakes to me).

MfG Kai