Re: death to tabs

[Thomas A. Horsley]

>Amen to that!  Working on files at home then at uni or vice versa screws up
>the tabs all the time! Our lecturers code drives me mad!  Some of their code
>is indented 2 spaces while others use non standard tab offsets with multiple
>tabs and when we add new code it goes all wonky because of tabs :(

Aside from merely using M-x untabify, you can also M-x set-variable and
change the tab-width variable first. That way if you can deduce (perhaps by
deciding which tab-width results in the most readable display) the value the
moron who wrote the code was using for tab-width, you can then untabify
after setting tab-width.

Of course, the true villian in the whole TAB story is the unknown (to me,
anyway) Prince of Evil who designed the first editor which allowed you to
change the tab width to be something other than 8, thus removing text
formatting information from the file, and placing it only in the brain of
the author (where it is unlikely to be recoverable by those who follow
after).

(Or worse yet, in the brains of multiple authors over time, all of
whom used different default values for the chunk of code they were
working on).

Of course, worse than TABs in Makefiles, there is Python - the language that
actually gives meaning to whitespace, yet also allows TABs in input source
files, (if you think other languages are wonky with TABs in 'em...)
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