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

[Richard Guenther]

On 3/13/07, Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> 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.

A tab is 8 spaces.  Always.

Richard.