Re: tab characters in the source code

[Joe Neeman]

On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 17:18 -0600, Carl D. Sorensen wrote:
> 
> 
> On 4/7/09 4:17 PM, "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> 
> 
> > 
> > As to LY not accepting tabs, thats a shame, tabs should be treated as
> > white space, along with <bel> <nul> <lf> <VT> and other now-disused
> > characters from the days of teletypes which sometimes find their way into
> > ascii files from odd unix and dos systems; this is done in the postscript
> > language.  Except perhaps in lyrics, where they might well be used to
> > demarcate syllables.
> 
> LilyPond accepts tabs just fine; they're whitespace.  If you want to put tab
> characters in your LilyPond source you can do so.
> 
> Programming standards for LilyPond call for avoiding the tab character.

Is this written down somewhere? I have nothing against it, but it seems
to be the opposite of what is actually used, at least in the C++ code.
The C++ code uses tabs with a tabstop of 8 characters. Since the default
indent is 2 characters, it requires a mix of tabs and spaces to indent
correctly. This seems pretty complicated to me, but I think it's the
emacs default style.

Joe