So where I work, we're adopting some coding standards, one of them is to not use tabs -- aparently because people don't know how to use them properly or are too lazy too something... -- it just seems kinda ridiculous to me that I'm going to have to start using spaces instead, boss keeps saying there are all kinds of arguments for not using tabs and none for using them...

Isn't this more of a there arn't any arguments for breathing either -- you just do it -- sorta thing? Or is there really a good reason not to use tabs?

Also, if anyone has a killer reason to use tabs over spacing, let me know, I'd love to hear it -- what are the opinions on a.cc?

Tabs are much faster, and generally more consistent. I only use spaces to indent when tab is way to big, or I can't use tabs (like on forums, AKA, here).

<cough>A tab is equivalent to 4 spaces for coding purposes</cough>

I would just keep using tabs... If you must, replace them with spaces when you're finished.

Actually, it aligns to a X space wide column. If you have:

foo\t

and 4 space wide tabs, your cursor shows up one character away from the last o.

My single argument for using tabs is that many people can work on the codebase at once and each can set his own indentation size according to his preference. With spaces, you get one normalized indentation size.

Also, if you use spaces, most editors won't allow you to easily drop a level of indentation when it's not needed anymore - and those that do will need to guess where the next higher indentation level is. This guessing process often doesn't work perfectly.

I'd say it's the other way around - I'd be hard-pressed to find any sort of reason against using tabs. About the only thing that comes to mind is that it can turn into a mess if you mix tabs and spaces to line up something, and someone tries to read that with a different tab setting. That's easily avoided, though.

EDIT:

Who the hell would want to use Word of all things to edit source code?

Quite a big reason, IMO. Some people can be quite religious about their tab size, and when things get all mixed up, trying to look through the code becomes a royal PITA.

Which is the problem.. it's not.

When you're working on a project with multiple people, you can't gaurantee everyone will do that. It's easier to say "no tabs" than "tabs are okay, just don't mix them with spaces or other characters".

In my own projects where I'm the only one working on it, I tend to use tabs. But then, I also know how to do stuff like this:

int main(int argc)
{
    if(argc > 1)                              // Print the number of args
        printf("You passed %d args\n", argc); // the user passed
    return 0;
}

without screwing it up with tabs.

Just use spaces. So you won't necessarily see the code with your preferred indent size, suck it up. Most people prefer reasonable indent sizes such as 2, 3, 4 or 8 chars. You can get used to any of them.

If you use spaces, your code will look the same no matter if it's in an email client, in the middle of a diff (with the extra +- chars at the front), thrown up on the web, viewed on the terminal with standard tools like cat and less, etc.

Don't care. Actually editing the code is what I care about. And using spaces mucks that up.

But you can mix tabs and spaces. Tabs are for indenting. Spaces are for lining up.

-T- is a tab; . is a space.

if ()
{
--T--foo();...// comment
--T--blah();..// comment.
}

Works great.

I guess mix is the wrong word, as I don't consider what you're doing "mixing" them perse (though you should still be shot):

--T--foo();...// comment
.....blah();--T--// comment.

that's mixing them -- and if using multiple editors, you will end up with lots of problems -- however, if you use all tabs, or all spaces these problems will NEVER come up for you. (hence, you kill spaces because they're harder to work with.)

/edit (I misenterpreted what karadoc had shown us to be something meaningful)

It's faster to press one key once than one key four (or eight) times. It is also more reliable, you don't need to remember if you pressed three or five times. I noticed some editors automatically insert spacing for certain keywords such as if statements or brackets, not sure which.

Are they using the show format option in word, and more importantly, why?

What is important to realize here, is the argument that tabs are different widths on different computers is flawed. Why? Because when you indent using spaces, you are forcing a tab size onto the end user of your code. And since you are forcing the user to use your tab size by using spaces, why not force it by telling the user to change their tab per space ratio, and use tabs? Both are identically annoying. I find much space indented code unreadable, and I'd rather have bad comment formatting in a few isolated spaces, than have the whole 10k+ line source file be afflicted with a 2-space indentation disaster.

E.g. I converted Karadoc ~~'s code to use only tabs. I use 4 space tabs in my editors, while allegro uses 8 spaces per tab. So this code shows how badly the mess up is:

if (we_want_to_do_stuff)
{  // stuff inside the if is tabbed
  variables =
    long_html_function(stuff.sub_stuff->mother,  // immediately after first arg.
            the_next_argument,      // Comments positioned with spaces
            other junk,          // in line with other comments.
            0);              // the end
}

Yes, the comments are messed up. A small price to pay for nicely indented code imho.

Whenever I get code that uses space indentation, I immediately nuke it using AStyle plugin from Code::Blocks which converts everything to tabs.

EDIT: Fixed typos