Tabs vs. Spaces

[Peter da Silva]

In article <1058 at ns.UUCP>, ddb at ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet) writes:
> In article <2601 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> :I don't count a full-blown Emacs as a popular editor, seeing as how it won't
> :run on anything with less than a couple of meg of virtual memory all for
> :itself to keep it cozy at night. 

> Epsilon runs happily in 256k on messy-dos, and does indenting just fine,
> thank you.  For that matter, MINCE on a 64k CP/M system did 
> minimally-useful indenting.  

Where can I get Epsilon or MINCE for SVR2 and SVR3 on a 68000 and a 68020
respectively, and for SIII on 80286 and 80386? Most 'C' code is written on
UNIX, and if it's not available on UNIX (vi or Emacs, basically) it doesn't
really matter.

Yes, I realise this reduces my argument to "vi and small Emacses don't
do an adequate job of handling non-tab indents", but that's the bottom
line. Most 'C' code is being written on machines where 8 character tabs
are the only way to go.

> For that matter, all that's really needed is a function to "indent under"
> (match indenting on the previous line), and a "delete-backward-hacking-tabs".

I won't go into the details here (argument by reference to nonexistent
authority), but this is not adequate. I've written macros to do this
sort of thing (in vi, even), and have never been as satisfied with it
as just doing it myself a tab at a time. How do you change your indenting
on the fly as the scope of your programming chages?
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Work: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter at ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.   `-_-'
Home: bigtex!texbell!sugar!peter, peter at sugar.uu.net.                 'U`
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