[clue-tech] OT: Tabs vs. Spaces in Source (Was: Son's PC and intro to programming)

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 16:37:20 -0700
William wrote:

> In any event, aren't we all WAY off-topic here?

Not entirely. If his son is of a mindset to be put off by dealing with
stuff such as whitespace inflexibility (and I can sorta understand that),
then maybe Python isn't a good choice. From the point of view of writing a
compiler to deal with an indentation-sensitive language (bletch -- IMHO),
how do you figure out the indentation level if you allow multiple
whitespace characters? Is 1 tab plus 4 spaces the same as 2 tabs?

A lot of this sort of debate is at least a bit amusing to me, since I
recall the days of coding sheets and COBOL, where the first 6 characters
were reserved for line numbers (later labels, but they still had to be
numeric -- i.e. you could you whatever number you wanted, as long as they
were in ascending order), column 7 was the "continuation column", and
anything past 72 was a comment, and your line couldn't exceed 80
characters. 

Modern programmers don't know how good they have it. ;)

jed
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