Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!weretis.net!feeder1.news.weretis.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Gregory Ewing Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: PEP8 and 4 spaces Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 18:55:37 +1200 Lines: 21 Message-ID: References: <53B59358.2040404@tobiah.org> <53b6019f$0$29985$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net IRaYw/SPCVtYnuaffLWifwsU5RfIEd0TYRi8H6oAcyvCEmllp3 Cancel-Lock: sha1:7MV1/7TKyvWI7Lt6GZO2YprIWJ8= User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (Macintosh/20050711) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <53b6019f$0$29985$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:73939 Steven D'Aprano wrote: >>That's exactly the problem with tabs - whatever you think your code >>looks like with tabs, other people will see quite different picture. > > Why do you consider this a problem? It's a problem if you try to use tabs for lining things up in a tabular fashion in your source code. The solution is not to use tabs for that -- only use tabs for indentation, and use spaces for everything else. Or, as PEP 8 suggests, don't try to line things up in the first place. I know it's ironic that tabs are no good for tabulation. But it's unavoidable in a plain text format that doesn't carry any metadata about how to interpret the tabs. -- Greg