RE: Question for removing trailing whitespaces (not vertical tab) from source

["Dave Korn" <dave dot korn at artimi dot com>]

On 13 March 2007 15:06, Andrew Haley wrote:

> Dave Korn writes:
>  > On 13 March 2007 14:02, Andrew Haley wrote:
>  >
>  > > Kai Tietz writes:
>  > >
>  > >  > I want to remove some trailing whitespaces from gcc source as coding
>  > >  style > demands. Also I wrote, while doing a small tool for that, a
>  > >  feature to > replace horiz. tabs by spaces. But the question is by
>  which > >  width should > be used ?
>  > >
>  > > 8.
>  >
>  >
>  >   Can you explain that value?  It's just that 1) I see vast acres and
>  acres of > code where the tabstop size is two spaces 2) the coding
>  standard doesn't seem > to /demand/ a specific tab size and 3) if we use
>  8-space TABs with the kind of > depths of nesting the gcc code often
>  contains we're going to exceed the > 80-column line length limit just on
>  the leading indentation alone pretty > often....
> 
> That's not the question I answered, which was "when I come across a
> leading tab character in GNU souce code, how many spaces does that tab
> represent?"  It says nothing about correct GNU indentation, which is
> two spaces.


  Thanks for clarification, the false inference I was making was that a TAB
was (or could be) equivalent to an indent level.  (Sometimes it is, of course
- I guess a lot of the mixed-formatting problems probably arise where a chunk
of code that used to be at one indent level that happened to be a multiple of
4 and hence could be aligned using TABs gets moved to a different context
where they would need to be converted to spaces and adjusted...)


    cheers,
      DaveK
-- 
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