I'm not sure why dicks are modding you down; that turned out to be a wonderfully interesting and noncommercial site which (gasp) is news for nerds like me and stuff that matters. I'm glad I caught your post before the "Offtopic" sourpusses did.

That said, I wasted most of the day on it and am at challenge 11, but I'm finding it's turning out to be less and less about python and more and more about silly logic games. Still, the widely different solutions people come up with are amazing.

If you look back at my original post, my whole point is that I don't give a flying fuck how people indent their code as as long as don't have to scratch my head to figure out how they liked their tabs. Which is why tabs are annoying.

You're the Nazi here, not me. I have to figure out what your tabs mean. Gee thanks a lot.

And why should anybody pander to your bizarre fetish?

Use Unix "unexpand" and shove in tabs everywhere you want. Whack off while changing the indents; I don't care. But for the source code I have to deal with, why must I try to figure out what particular tab setting made you orgasm?

If you are truly obsessed with a 7-space indent, then go ahead and use that but don't make me have to try to guess it.

Well maybe that's going to be fixed. Let's see:

>>> from __future__ import braces
File "", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance
>>>

Nope.

PS: That's real, try it yourself

I don't use tabs, so this does not apply to me.

But the main point is, I have seen tons of code over the past 20 years of my coding experience with this problem. The very existence of the Unix "expand" program which converts tabs to spaces per choice is concrete evidence of this.

So, since apparently most everybody uses tabs incorrectly, and there does not seem to be any point at all with using tabs instead of spaces, then why use tabs at all? Are there really people who get their jollies by changing the tab value to make code look different on their screens?

Tab (ascii 9) goes back to typewriters and teletypes and is effectively an 8 indent because terminals and printers and other devices assume it by default. So if you don't want an 8-space indent, don't use a tab. If you do want an 8-space indent, you can't assume the viewers device will treat it that why, so why bother with a tab at all?

.

Tabs do not work. Don't use them. Consider this, where there's a tab before the "int" and the "//" comment using the 8-space standard and the intent is to get the comments to line up. I'm using "_" instead of spaces to get around slashdot formatting grief:

________int_a;__________//_Hello
________int_Whatever;___//_Yeah

If you set your editor, printer, viewer, whatever to use 4 space tabs it becomes this:

____int_a;______//_Hello
____int_Whatever;___//_Yeah

I for one am sick and tired of having to reverse engineer what some frustrated artistic genius decided to use for their tab offset. Set your editor to expand tabs to spaces to whatever you want and save everyone the grief of trying to figure out what you were trying to do, because I really don't give a damn if you use 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 space indentation; I just don't want to have to guess my way to making your code line up.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

- John W. Garner

De-orbiting from geosync is way to expensive to be an option (too high delta-V). What they use instead is the "graveyard orbit". At the end of operational life, the satellite just does some final burns to raise its orbit by a few hundred km, where it is no longer geosynchronous but also out of the way of the geosync orbit. Satellites launched into geosync are required to have this capability.

If you meet a Croat, tell him Tesla was Serbian. If you meet a Serb, tell him Tesla was Croatian. Watch the sparks fly.

(Tesla was born in what is now Croatia, but was ethnically Serbian).

By default (no arguments, out of the box) valgrind gives a description of the problem and a stack backtrace with the names of the procedures, files and linenumbers. You can tell it to also drop you into the debugger of your choice at the offending line.

The point is, your accusation "You goto valgrind and bisect issues" (exact quote) would make unfamiliar readers think that valgrind does not give the exact source code location where the errors occur and that, sir, is a flat out lie. I'm sorry that there are no weaker words for it.