this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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It's not difficult at all, and many editors and IDEs already support this, making the entire point moot. Just do whatever the style guide says. I'm into PHP and Python so for me it's spaces all the way.
How can it tell the difference between spaces used for indentation and spaces used for alignment, if you use the same character for both?
I guess the indention sizer thing knows how the formater works and adjusts accordingly. I can't imagine it would be too much of a problem.
Iirc Jetbrain IDEs has a feature called dynamic tabs/space (or something like that) which uses exclusively tabs until it needs to align something and a tab doesn't fit, so it uses a few spaces instead.
Maybe alignment more for the righthand side of assignments. If you have a block of variables with different name lengths, or within a constructor / function call.
All parsers ignore a shitload of whitespace already. Just compare unformatted code, COMPLETELY unformatted code, code without character returns, and it'll become obvious how any given language is interpreted around whitespace.
Also fun to see just how infrequent a semicolon is 'actually' needed to tell when the end of a statement is here.