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Updated FAQ (markdown)

Andrew Kelley 2022-02-24 16:17:03 -05:00
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FAQ.md

@ -17,17 +17,15 @@ You can also:
## Why does Zig force me to use spaces instead of tabs?
Because the tooling is not yet stable.
Because no human and no contemporary code editor is capable of handling tabs correctly. Humans tend to mix tabs and spaces on accident, and editors don't have a way to "indent with tabs, align with spaces" without mashing the space bar a bajillion times.
`zig fmt` accepts and converts tabs to spaces, `\r\n` to `\n`, as well as many other transformations of non-canonical to canonical style.
Honestly, tabs would be better than spaces for indentation because they take up fewer bytes. But in practice, what ends up happening is chaos.
The Zig language accepts hard tabs and carriage returns. The self-hosted compiler implements the Zig language correctly; accepting hard tabs and carriage returns. However, the self-hosted compiler is not yet complete, and what people are using in reality is the stage1 compiler, which does not accept hard tabs.
So to simplify everything and prevent the horrors of incorrectly mixed tabs and spaces, tabs are not allowed. Spaces are necessary; we can't ban spaces. But tabs are not strictly needed, so the null hypothesis is to not have them.
Hard tabs are not accepted by stage1 because:
* It doesn't need to. All of the self-hosted compiler source is formatted with `zig fmt` and so there are no hard tabs. The complexity of dealing with hard tabs need not be present in stage1.
* `zig fmt` is not fully stable yet; use of `zig fmt` is not yet ubiquitous. If stage1 accepted hard tabs, then in practice, there would be accidental mixing of tabs and spaces.
Maybe someday, we'll switch to tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment and make it a compile error if you fuck it up. But if we did that today, writing Zig code would be too hard.
If you feel the need to spend any more of your precious hours left on this Earth thinking about tabs and spaces, see [The Hard Tabs Issue](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544).
So suck it up and switch your editor to insert spaces when you press the tab key.
## Why does `zig fmt` have no configuration options?