Questions tagged [whitespace]
The whitespace tag has no summary.
21 questions
3 votes
2 answers
747 views
Why don't modern programming languages enforce whitespace around identifiers?
I recently fell in love with Factor , a programming language in the Forth family that enforces use of whitespace around identifiers, this allows creation of "functions" with extremely terse ...
- 139
4 votes
3 answers
6k views
Why do we still have programming languages that rely on indentation / white space? [duplicate]
A long time ago when starting learning programming I remember a teacher saying that compiler do not care about whitespace and they are useful to make code readable for human beings. It made perfect ...
- 452
2 votes
4 answers
561 views
What coding practices are most useful dealing with trailing whitespace in data fields in binary files?
We have an application that consists binary files (containing a mix of text and numeric information) and programs written in various languages that create, modify and read these binary files. Because ...
- 2,751
-2 votes
2 answers
268 views
Tracking column (offset) in presence of tab characters
Imagine that you first write a compiler for your language where you necessarily report errors to the user. Compiler also collects location information for backend tools. They must know where the ...
9 votes
11 answers
26k views
Is too much whitespace a bad thing? [closed]
I'm often told by my friends and colleagues that I use way to much whitespace. I guess I do use a little too much whitespace. I often add a line break almost after every line and large blocks of ...
- 235
0 votes
1 answer
88 views
How using tab affects commands like diff
In the page at http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.indenting.php, it is advised to use space instead of tab as it causes issue with diff, patches. Here is the excerpt from the page. Use an ...
user88873
12 votes
3 answers
9k views
When should you trim input?
I am intern learning tons about the industry outside of academia. One thing I thought about today was trimming input. On one side of the coin I don't want the user/implementer to constantly ...
- 265
1 vote
2 answers
598 views
Python code style - blank lines in long list
I'm curious, is there a standard approach to dealing with long lists in the Python community, and in particular, is there any antipathy toward doing blank lines followed by comments to break up a ...
- 113