Re: [PATCH] avoid GDB crash on inspection of pascal arrays

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2010 09:16:51 +0400
> From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
> Cc: gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> 
> >   Formatting with the tab/spaces conversion is still a nightmare
> > for me...
> 
> (you could get me started on a rambling about the rid^H^H^Huse of
> tabs instead of spaces in our source code - I just can't get over
> these tabs)
> 
> > I really don't know vi enough to reformat correctly an almost 100
> > lines long block... Is there a neat way to do this just with vi
> > or do I need something more powerful?
> 
> I think that the canonical tool for formatting is emacs. Each time
> I mentioned the idea of getting rid of tabs, some said that the
> formatting rules need to match what emacs does. For a GNU project,
> it's probably fair.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't remember emacs anymore.

If it helps someone, here's the Emacs recipe for converting all tabs
into the equivalent number of spaces:

  . Step 1: type "M-x set-variable RET tab-width RET 8 RET"

  . Step 2: mark the region of text where you want to get rid of tabs;
    if that's the whole buffer, type "C-x h" to mark all of it

  . Step 3: type "M-x untabify RET", then save the buffer

The first step makes sure each tab stop is 8 columns, the default
width of a TAB character.  It is there because some people (and some
files) override that default, and Emacs will honor such settings by
expanding each tab into that number of spaces.