Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

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> everyone can read the code with the indentation they prefer, while the file stays the same.

Have you ever worked in a code base with many contributors that changed over the course of years? In my experience it always ends up a jumble where indentation is screwed up and no particular tab setting makes things right. I've worked on files where different lines in the same file might assume tab spacing of 2, 3, 4, or 8.

For example, say there is a function with a lot of parameters, so the argument list gets split across lines. The first line has, say, two tabs before the start of the function call. The continuation line ideally should be two tabs then a bunch of spaces to make the arguments line up with the arguments from the first line. But in practice people end up putting three or four tabs to make the 2nd line line up with the arguments of the first line. It looks great with whatever tab setting the person used at that moment, but then change tab spacing and it no longer is aligned.

On the good side, the problem of mixing tabs and spaces does normally not appear in Go sources, as gofmt always converts spaces to tabs, so there is no inconsistant indentation. Normally I prefer spaces to tabs because I dislike the mixing, but gofmt solves this nicely for me.

Please explain to me how this works for the case I outlineed, eg:

        some_function(arg1, arg2, arg3, arg4,
                      arg5, arg6);

For the sake of argument, say tabstop=4. If the first line starts with two tabs, will the second line also have two tabs and then a bunch of spaces, or will it start with five tabs and a couple spaces?

You wouldn't use an alignment-based style, but a block-based one instead:

  some_function(
      arg1,
      arg2,
      arg3,
      arg4,
      arg5,
      arg6,
  );

(I don't know what Go idiom says here, this is just a more general solution.)

Checking the original code on the playground, Go just reindents everything using one tab per level. So if the funcall is indented by 2 (tabs), the line-broken arguments are indented by 3 (not aligned with the open paren).

rustfmt looks to try and be "smarter" as it will move the argslist and add linebreaks to it go not go beyond whatever limit is configured on the playground, gofmt apparently doesn't insert breaks in arglists.

In an ideal world, I'd think you would put a "tab stop" character before arg1, then a single tab on the following line, with the bonus benefit that the formatting would survive automatic name changes and not create an indent-change-only line in the diff. Trouble being that all IDEs would have to understand that character, and compilers would have to ignore it (hey, ASCII has form feed and vertical tab that could be repurposed...).

You should NOT do such alignment anyway, because if you rename "some_function" to "another_function", then you will lose your formatting.

Instead, format arguments in a separate block:

    some_function(
        arg1, arg2, arg3, arg4,
        arg5, arg6);

When arguments are aligned in a separate block, both spaces and tabs work fine.

My own preference is tabs, because of less visual noise in code diff [review].

> In my experience it always ends up a jumble where indentation is screwed up and no particular tab setting makes things right.

Consider linting tools in your build.

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