That’s one of the benefits of using tabs. Some people might like 4 spaces for indentation, whereas others like 2 spaces. If you use tabs, you can configure your editor to use whatever tab size you want, and they’re just stored as tab characters in the file.
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment (eg for ASCII art).
That’s why it’s also a big accessibility feature. With big font sizes, four spaces are distracting but you can configure tabs to show up as one character, which is way more reasonable with font sizes larger than usual
I had a colleague that is legally blind in my second real job. The dude is brilliant (and hilarious) but these things would significantly enable or screw up his productivity. I have always felt fortunate to have had direct butt in seat exposure to the importance of accessibility at such a young age.
It’s Hebrew for double colon apparently, it came from the Israeli Zend framework PHP was based on. Some dev thought it would be funny to add an error in a language other than English.
Sorry, my phrasing was sloppy. Most popular IDEs and editors do not have a plug-in or setting that implements elastic tabstops correctly. In particular, there’s no implementation for vim, emacs, VSCode, eclipse, or any JetBrains IDEs. (I had forgotten that there’s one for Visual Studio and one for Notepad++.)
It’s been a minute since I used C/Cpp but if you compile with debugging symbols and using gdb give you info like in Java? At least the location of the crash.
I just remembered the dumbest argument I’ve ever suffered about this - someone insisting the “length” of one tab changed, depending on what’s before it. As in, is it eight spaces, or seven? Or six! It only goes up to eight spaces! No. It goes one stop. The same way a newline goes one line, and cannot by measured by how many times you’d slap the spacebar to get text to wrap around to the next line.
They mean if you insert a tab after some other text.
Word processors and desktop publishing apps tend to have tab stops (sometimes visible in a ruler at the top of the page) and pressing tab goes to the next tab stop. They’re about an inch apart (assuming letter or A4 paper) by default, and you can usually also add your own tab stops. For example, you might have text like this:
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