Tabs Are Evil, Part 3

For part 2, see here. We've got a new forum set up for the Java Posse. There's quite a bit of activity there already. One entry in this thread argues once again that there is nothing wrong with tabs and that they are a good way to express indentation. (We keep mentioning that Tabs Are Bad on the show). I've gotten similar feedback from my previous anti-tab blog entries. A couple of weeks ago I was taking a look at the findbugs source code, and here's what I saw: Findbugs follows a coding style where it uses tabs for indentation. In the above you can see that the tabs are really standing out since I have them highlighted with the NetBeans fixtabs module. The thing to notice is that there are lines where spaces are (probably accidentally) used for indentation. For example, line 2, the beginning of the method signature. And also on line 3, where there is first a tab, then eight spaces, to indent the throws clause. If this source file is interpreted with tabs expanded to anything other than 8, the code will not be aligned properly. And this is precisely what is problematic about Tabs. Tabs, in most editors, are visually indistinguishable from spaces. Thus, when you're editing, you can't tell that you've accidentally just indented a line with spaces. Obviously, developers might do this by accident, since they already hit the spacebar to insert whitespace between symbols. You can't have the IDE automatically insert tabs instead of spaces. But you can certainly do the opposite. And if you do, you'll avoid problems like these.

Date: September 19, 2006
Category: Developers

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