Lines have a 20 column range for breaking. If you are particularly worried
about tab variation, split the difference -- if you personally aim for a
cut-off of 90 columns, you'll still fall in the 80-100 column range for
most tab variations (until you get into multiple tabs, but at that point
two 8-space tabs uses up ~16-20% of your usable space, and gets
progressively more consumptive from there).
Nabil
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
I've always wondered about something:
Given the 2 rules:
- "Lines should be broken at between 80 and 100 columns."[1]
- "You should make no assumptions about the number of spaces per
tab."[2]
I have a couple of questions:
- What should we do if someone who uses 1 space tabs writes a 99
character line (including the tab)?
- If you are using more than 1 space per tab, you they are breaking
the 100 column rule.
- What should we do if someone who uses 8 space tabs tells you that you
are breaking the 100 column rule?
- If you are using less than 8 spaces per tab, than you aren't
breaking the 100 column rule.
I get why there's no value in starting a holy war over spaces-per tab, but
this is a good example of why it's also a problem to not make a decision
one way or another.
This is not hypothetical, we have people on our team (VisualEditor) who use
8, 4 and 3 (that I know of).
- Trevor
[1]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CC#Line_continuation
[2]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CC#Tab_size