Joomla! Discussion Forums

According to http://help.joomla.org/content/view/826/125/ Joomla! uses PEAR standards, including a 4 space no tab indentation.

However, both Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x use tabs throughout.

I'm assuming the documentation should be changed?

Personally, prefer tabs anyway because of document weight and user friendliness (you can change tabs to be however long you want in your editor).

Jonah

Yes, that is the way it should be.



If it is so (I don't see tabs, since my editor corrects them to spaces seemlessly), the code should be cleaned up, not the documentation.



That is a very old discussion. It usually ends up with space indentation peferred, because the interpretation of spaces is the same on any any system in any editor, not so tabs.

Niels

Ok, we're talking the entire codebase here. 

Can any core or dev group members comment on this?  I'm not trying to push one standard or the other, but rather have the inconsistency between documentation and reality fixed.

I don't consider this being a big issue. The code style guide is not a documentation of what is, but of what should be. Any discrepancy here do not hurt. But you're right, on the long term, this should be corrected. Since most editors allow autoconversion from tabs to spaces, I suggest, that any dev sets the preferences of his editor accordingly, so any file gets corrected when touched. This way, the code will adhere to the style guide in this point very fast. In any case, this violation of the style guide does not require immediate interception.

I believe most of the developers are currently using tabs.  As far as I know, the style guide was mostly abandoned when the S&G (Standards & Guidelines) WG was dissolved.  I will flag this for Wilco to look at it and he can do whatever he thinks appropriate.

This is all being revised at the following url: http://dev.joomla.org/component/option, ... ds:coding/

Louis

Ya, except it should be the more popular java variation of K&R, not the brace on next line version.    Anyway, I'll stop now since K&R are quoted as saying "The position of braces is less important"...

Our de facto standard is worse than that. It's actually something close to "brace at end of current line if subsequent code block is round(2 + rand(0,1)) lines or less; otherwise brace on next line".

I have looked extensively at the possibility of automatically formatting the code base, and there is no inexpensive tool that I have found which is capable of doing it successfully. I have evaluated several, and I suspect the expensive tools won't do it either. "Re-grep Bison" followed by "write real-world code formatting tool" are on my to-do list, but the current estimated completion date is >2050, well past my estimated lifespan.

This is particularly irritating since I am having trouble convincing Eclipse to support spaces in one project and tabs in the next.

then pull out the sledge hammer: http://www.eclipse.org/dash/index.php

CirTap

The complete source code of version 1.5 should be converted using spaces for indentation! This ist not a huge problem.

So far I know PEAR claim on spaces is because potential CVS server inconsistencies. It is still a good reason these days given actual SVN performance?