Re: Request For Comments: 3-space indentation style

["D. Matt Placek" <atomicsuntan@...>]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 6:52 PM, immerrr again <immerrr+lua@gmail.com> wrote:

So, it'd be nice to collect some opinions/statistics about indentation
offsets that are currently used community-wide. Admittedly, I haven't
programmed in Lua for quite a while.

Aside from that, does anyone remember the origin of this 3-space
indentation convention?

I didn't even realize this was the convention; I've always set my indent levels to 3 anywhere I can in emacs and just assumed lua mode was picking it up from somewhere else.

For most of my career I've always used 3 spaces, mostly because it feels "just right" and I'd been lucky enough to work in environments where I could get away with it, but it's certainly less conventional than 4 which is more common for {} languages, or 2 which seems to be popular for the scripting languages.  Four is just a stretch more than is necessary, and two is not quite enough for the indentation to stand out.  Three seems to be perfect.  That's a completely unscientific and purely aesthetic opinion, of course.