[asdf-devel] How about a tabs versus spaces policy for asdf?

[dherring at tentpost.com]

> I would just be tickled to death if we were to ban tab characters from
> asdf code (I'm convinced by jwz's argument, and I've been harmed enough
> times by Windows-versus-others tab issues), but I'd be ok with keeping
> them.
>
> Do we have a consensus on tabs-versus-spaces?

For general prefix indentation purposes, I prefer tabs.  Something about
the semantics of "indent" versus the fixed-width-font-specific "4 or 8
spaces" allows the end viewer to easily change indentation to fit their
display device.  The normative indentation rules for C/Java languages
support tabs rather nicely (with few cases where spaces would be
preferred).

Expecting tabs to line up with other characters is evil.
(corollary) Mixing tabs and spaces is evil.

Lisp code is traditionally indented at non-even spacings, with the
explicit expectation of alignment.  Thus I think spaces-only is the
current best practice for lisp.  In an ideal world, the editor would take
care of all display formatting, and whitespace would only be used for
tokenization...

- Daniel