Re: Kawa Code Formatting

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Chris Bitmead <chrisb@nimrod.itg.telstra.com.au> writes:

> I was browsing the kawa code and I notice the fomatting re tabs and
> spaces doesn't seem consistent. The result is it looks a bit of a mess
> in my editor. It might be worth running the source through some sort of
> formatter.

It's consistent, from a Unix/Emacs point of view.  I.e. tabs are
always 8 spaces, and Emacs generates a combination of tabs and
spaces to properly indent things.  Kawa code will not indent
properly unless you have 8-character tab stops.

You can argue about this convention, but it is more-or-less
the standard convention for GNU code (i.e. a slight modification
of the GNU C/C++ convention to handle Java).

In my previous job we agreed on a different indentation convention,
but disagreed on use of tabs.  It seems in the PC world, tabs
are a thing of user preference, and identation is one tab per level.
This is very different from the Unix world, where tabs are almost
always 8 spaces.  (Of course Emacs can be programmed to do the
desired thing, and that is what we ended up doing.  However, other
tools are a different matter, using using 8-space tabs makes things
very "wide".)

Another reason I'm loath to run Kawa code though a re-indenter
is that it makes it difficult to compare different versions
of a file.

I'm not absolutely opposed to changing the identation and tabbing
conventions used in Kawa - but as long as I'm still writing over
90% of the code, it doesn't seem to make much sense.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/~per/