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

[Andrew Haley]

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.

Andrew.