The Great Debate: Tabs or spaces?

Tabs are great for lining up: For....Next, If....End If, Do...Loop etc but spaces here and there can pretty-up the code

But if you can't confuse the next coder with your odd personalized usage of tabs and spaces how are you going to confuse them enough to convince the boss with your coding skills are irreplaceable and worth a pay-rise?

Parabolic, Hyperbolic, Elliptic? They're all beautiful

Hi
I think indenting is very helpful. I think up until now I have only seen one professional that does not always use them .. ( – that Indian Guy, Dinesh Kumar Takyar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgZA...em-subs_digest )

The convenience of hitting the Tab key one or more times to achieve the required indent I find/ found very convenient.
But, I think it is one of these things like carriage returns and line feeds. Sometimes there are inconsistencies in different situations and systems in how they are defined, used and / or interpreted.
Recently when learning about reading data from / to different things I saw a lot of inconsistencies in carriage returns and line feeds and combinations there of. You see similar inconsistencies sometimes when simply copying and pasting text into/from different systems, - you can get for example either extra lines, or your text of multiple lines may come out as a continuous single line.

I expect you can run into similar inconsistencies in how Tabs are interpreted.
I guess it is the inconsistency in how many spaces a Tab might “look like” that bugs me**.

So I personally, am tending to go for spaces as I know then at least what I have.. maybe..
**I tend to run text / data that I have sometimes through a code that checks what it actually has in it in terms of carriage returns and line feeds, ( https://www.excelforum.com/developme...ml#post4664188 ). It would probably be a good idea for me to extend that to check for the presence a Tab as well.

_._________

I would find it useful if you could use the “empty spaces” you use for indents so as to help keep track in a large code of the different sections, like somehow being able to include ‘comments not only at the end of a code line…..

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Alan



P.s.’s
_ It remains a pain in the bum , in my opinion, that Forum Editors typically eat __ spaces _____ .. of more than one in text.
Tabs don’t appear to work either.
_ Interestingly, I have seen bugs in Forum Editors whereby those ‘ii’’s , ‘wivwon’’s and ‘jjjj’’s of mine do actually appear in the form of ****’s in a code window. … Strange.
_.....
_ What is a Tab?? – A Slab … of nothing … or spaces … or s p a c e s of a space in length ????

I think I will call these: ‘ii’’s , ‘wivwon’’s and ‘jjjj’’s … vbSlab ‘ s





The Ace of spaces, http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=1..._Ace_Of_Spades

Not sure how well known this one is but I've used this VBA procedure Smart indenter Add in for many years

Originally Posted by Laz

It's 'character', Chr(9). - How interpreted is defined by the editor

Thanks, Laz, - I expected it was something like that. I would imagine a Tab is a little better behaved, that is to say is not changed to a different character by different systems/ editors, as I have found is the case with Carriagereturns and Linefeeds sometimes .
I expect you can probably adjust in some things how many “spaces” a Tab is. I could not google anything, but I think someone mentioned you can change some settings somewhere.
I am still not too keen on using something that might look different in different systems.
I had a quick play just now:
In a cell, if you paste in _ vbTab & "somefink" & vbTab & "somefinkelse" _ then you just seem to see _ somefinksomefinkelse _ If you copy that and paste in word you get something like _ _somefink___somefinkel _ ( note a bit is lost at the end )
That all seems very messy
If I instead paste _ "___" & "somefink" & "___" & "somefinkelse" _ in a cell , then it truncates that to single spaces _ _somefink somefinkelse _ Copying that to word looks similar _ _somefink somefinkelse _
So that is all a bit messy also.
Also you need to be careful with the “type“ of space, - there is at least two that I know about: You have a non breaking space thingy and then the normal space character (32). You sometime need to be careful about that when using some Functions that only recognise the Char(32) as a space: https://support.office.com/en-us/art...c-9e5630b479f9 You will sometimes need to do something like this _ SUBSTITUTE("SchTxt",CHAR(32)," ") _ to get over that problem.
So all very messy again.
If you look into “Tab” conventions in Debug.Print, then you get something else again- you have things like Tab and Tab(x) which gives you a “position across” rather than a “gap”

It is all quite a mess. It is a shame, in my opinion, that some developers never got their heads together and got a bit more consistency in all these things.

_......
_._______________________________-
@ Richard.
That Add in looks quite involved. I did not realise anyone used things like that. I thought most people would like just write the complete set of things that would need indenting in one go, then fill in the lines between.., like I mean one would do this first_...
___ If ……..

___ Else ……

___ End If ……
_.... then after doing that, you go back and fill in the lines in between

A lot of people do that I think, and it usually helps to keep things tidy and avoid forgetting things line the End ‘s and Next ‘s

https://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-...ml#post3869151
https://www.excelforum.com/the-water...ml#post4613355

But I installed and tried out the Smart Identifier Add-In though.
It seems quite neat and quick. It seems very handy to clean up codes got from somewhere else. ( I think it has a go at repairing, or at least warns if you have missed out something like a End or Next). I need to experiment a bit more with that.
Il does not quite indent as I prefer to , - it does it like most people do, like this:

___ If ……..
______Let ….
___ Else ……
______Let ….
___ End If ……

I prefer like this:

___ If ……..
____ Let ….
___ Else ……
____ Let ….
___ End If ……

But a useful Add in to have. Thanks for suggesting that Add-In.

_...

Alan