On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Jeff King wrote: > > In what way does an all-space model cause people to accidentally add > tabs, but an all-tab model does not cause people to accidentally add > spaces? It happens. We do de-spacification in the kernel occasionally when it is an annoyance. Usually it shows up in patches, though - exactly because code which adds spaces instead of tabs won't line up correctly in the diff. So it doesn't matter *which* one you use (all spaces or all tabs) in that sense. But clearly tabs are *way* more common at least in any UNIX project, and tabs really do have the advantage of being smaller. And smaller *is* faster. Do something like this on the kernel: GIT_PAGER= time git grep sched_fair and then do the same thing with the kernel sources blown up by 20% by de-tabification. Guess which one is 20% slower? And whoever said that disk space doesn't matter doesn't know what he is talking about. Disk space most *definitely* matters. Do the above test with a cold-cache case, and think what 20% more IO does to you (or 20% less disk cache). But no, the size issues are secondary, I'm not claiming anything else. Although I do suspect that historically, they have been primary, and have been the thing that has resulted in the fact that tabs are so commonly used. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
