yade-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Caulk <rob.caulk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey yade devs,

Lately I’ve been letting my editor automatically remove trailing white
space in the files I’m working on. The benefit to doing this can be
disputed, but it seems most people agree that trailing white space is
undesirable because it can create unwanted commit noise and interfere with
other developers quick keys [1]. A Couple other benign reasons highlighted
in that thread:

   - It takes more storage space than necessary
   - The parser will have to skip an extra character for no good reason
   when compiling
   - Some editors might add an extra blank line when WordWrap is on and the
   trailing space doesn't fit
   - It feels like the cursor is hanging in thin air at the end of a line,
   every step to the right may cause it to either drop or to hover further to
   an unknown extent, it just feels unsteady (like those invisible or
   disappearing blocks that Super Mario used to jump on).


But clearly the first commit on a file where existing trailing white space
is removed is also going to look excessive and polluted [2]...

I will follow the majority opinion in our community on keeping or
progressively doing away with trailing white space. Thoughts?

Cheers,

Robert

[1]
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/121555/why-is-trailing-whitespace-a-big-deal
[2]
https://gitlab.com/yade-dev/trunk/merge_requests/296/diffs?diff_id=59111225&start_sha=bfa40d9617c0c3f03c5d8eaddfd52d4c075f2781#65534ad2321a960558c286a3a64b1c38fb17f52c