Consensus on the kdelibs coding style

[Lucas Murray]

On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Kelly Miller <lightsolphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On July 5, 2008 9:41:23 am Lubos Lunak wrote:
>> - "4 spaces, no tabs" - this appears to be the most used style in kdelibs,
>> and other options don't seem to have big advantages
>
> Can someone explain to me what's so evil about tabs?  Personally, I hate
> stumbling across spaced code indents, because they're horribly inflexible,
> can't be resized at all, and require the programmer in question to remember to
> hit the space key X times for an indent.
>

Tabs are okay in most cases, however when they are used to align
multiple lines by mixing in spaces with them things get a little messy
as not everyone has their tab size set to the same amount. Some people
use the default 8, a large amount use 4 and a few even use 2 character
indents. Using spaces completely removes this problem. Take for
example the following for-loop, I have repeated twice to so what it
would look like if the person that wrote it used 4 character indents
while the other uses 8:

for( ToplevelList::ConstIterator it = windows.begin();
     it != windows.end();
     ++it )
{
    // 4-character tab, for-loop arguments are aligned
}

for( ToplevelList::ConstIterator it = windows.begin();
         it != windows.end();
         ++it )
{
        // 8-character tab, out of alignment
}

As for pressing the space bar: Any decent editor these days can
automatically place the required amount of spaces when the tab key is
pressed to bring it into alignment with other lines.