Re: [Caml-list] What does Jane Street use/want for an IDE? What about you?

[Hugo Ferreira <hmf@inescporto.pt>]

Thomas Gazagnaire wrote:
> I would prefer to not have an editor which modify completely the file I 
> am working on (ie. automatically replace tab by spaces). When working on 
> big project, you cannot assume that everybody use spaces-based editor, 
> and you still want to minimize the diff size of your patches.
>

That is the whole issue. If you work in a big project wherein everyone
can you use their own "tab length", maintaining consistent indentation
is difficult (if not impossible). As Romain Bardou pointed out, you
can even use the same editors with differing "tab length". Real messy.
And the bigger the project and the longer it needs maintenance the worse
it gets.

BTW, I believe all editors are "space based" :-)

HF.

> Thomas
> 
> 2008/10/23 Romain Bardou <Romain.Bardou@lri.fr 
> <mailto:Romain.Bardou@lri.fr>>
> 
>             That's actually nearly what Camelia has right now. Right now
>             Camelia
>             insists on not dealing with tabs at all -- it converts them
>             all to
>             spaces. This "feature" has to go obviously, and it's a
>             few-liner to
>             convert between characters (which include tabs) and columns.
> 
> 
>         What do you mean with this? Reason I ask is that in OcalIDE an
>         option to
>         save files with spaces only, was added because it allows one to
>         simultaneously edit files in various editors, each with its own tab
>         "length". If not, indenting is not maintained. I myself think that
>         avoiding tabs altogether is a good solution.
> 
> 
>     I agree.
> 
>     Even without changing your editor, you can change the tab length.
> 
>     Moreover, if the editor uses tabs and counts them as more than one
>     character (default behavior of emacs) it won't be able to locate
>     errors correctly.
> 
>     Finally, when you use backspace to delete one space and suddenly it
>     deletes eight of them because it was actually a tab, it's annoying
>     because it's unpredictable.
> 
>     Altogether, this means that if you edit a file and put tabs in it,
>     it may work for you, but it may annoy the people you give your file
>     to :p
> 
>     -- 
>     Romain Bardou
> 
> 
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