Reply to post: Re: My code won't run but the spaces are great

Re: My code won't run but the spaces are great

@ Richard Plinston 2 posts up

I have actually read your posts and you use the tab key just as I do, where we differ in how that indent is actually stored in the file. The references to my trusty BEEB were that when I came across machines that did not store ASCII 9 as my IDE did but instead used multiple spaces then I felt this was a waste given that finding yourself halfway across the page to terminate a block was not unusual nor was having more characters in the indent than in the code on that line.

If the IDE can manage to keep track of how wide your indents are why does it need to store the spaces at all, surely the same process of storing the changes to indentation would be much more efficent. Ah but then it would not look the same on the text editor of my choice and my answer is why are you opening IDE files in a text editor, yes historically the language might have origonally used the text editor before anyone got around to creating an IDE but who still does for large projects.

You say efficency is irrelevant because it is everywhere in computing and attempting to get people to see it is useless, after all relative to the size of modern storage a few extra bytes here or there are meaningless. I agree that only changing this one item of waste on it's own is not enough but this is a thread read by people who program some of which are demanding that nothing changes, what better forum for getting some change away from the continuing acceptance that waste is reasonable or inevitable.

My mind set is actually that many programmers do not consider this waste an issue at all and whilst this has been a boon to storage manufacturers, perhaps it is time to look at the issue again, given that lots of people are using relatively smaller computers again.

Personally I think this is an ideal opportunity to get rid of the bloat mindset that has become a joke with some other operating systems. You seem to want to argue that what we have now is all there can ever be and I am suggesting that the evidence is against it, things have changed at lot over both our lifetimes and I would suggest they will continue to change further, hopefully for the better.