Home Original page

Tab wars revisited (was Re: Python indentation)

Sam Jervis sam at heffalump.me.uk
Thu Jul 8 04:04:29 EDT 2004 
> On what planet is *anyone* forced to use Notepad for real
> development?  That is, for anything other than emergency
> one-offs?
> 
> -Peter

The company where I used to work was one such planet :(

Nonetheless, tabs are still evil even if you are forced to use notepad. 
  I used a two space indent, which was tolerable for the ASP work I was 
doing.

<OT>
The problem was that they didn't want to spend money getting a license 
for any of the IDEs used by the permanent staff for me because I wasn't 
there for long, and I wasn't allowed to install my own editor because 
they had a general policy against installing anything "unapproved" on 
their computers.  Vim fell under this category and I was told to remove 
it before "anyone saw it".

This was before the all singing all dancing notepad you get with Windows 
XP.  This was a notepad which didn't have a line number display in the 
status bar or a go to line feature.  I used to locate errors by putting 
a 6 at the start of the line that I thought was wrong and seeing which 
line the resulting ASP syntax error was on.
</OT>

Sam
More information about the Python-list mailing list