Interesting language comparison article [OT]

[Unknown W. Brackets]

That's only because they are used inconsistently.  The general rule is 
that tabs should never be used after a non-tab character on a line. 
Bam, instant portability and everyone gets their own tab size.

It's the crazies that try to indent equal signs with tabs that give hard 
tabs a bad name.  That should be spaces because you're lining up 
characters, not indenting.

Plus I like my files slightly smaller.  I checked once, and at 4 spaces 
to a tab I save a surprising amount of space.  This is probably because 
I'm a prude about one statement per line and such.

As for forums, being that I wrote forum software previously, I can tell 
you with some assurity that this is only caused by using crappy forum 
software.  The software I was involved with supported tabs just fine, 
and I used them in the code examples I posted with it.

Tabbing is elementary.  I don't bold parts of my code.  No one complains 
about language Z requiring thing X to be italic.

-[Unknown]


> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>> "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy at gmail.com> wrote in message 
>> news:dv84il$1q3l$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>>
>>> Stick to the tab key all you want. I want to kill the ascii code for 
>>> the "so called" tab character!!
>>
>>
>> I never understood this whole hard-tab-hating stuff.  Everything lines 
>> up on nice neat columns, they can be set to whatever width you want, 
>> and it's much quicker to move through them using the arrow keys.  
>> What's so great about spaces?
>>
> 
> Tabs are a bit inconsistent.
> 
> They are, as you say, a bit costumizable, but the result is that they're 
> also not "portable"!
> They aren't reliable for text layout. When you write a piece of code 
> that uses tabs and try to insert it in forums (I mean real forums, not 
> NGs), they won't always look like what you expect.
> 
> Plus the python problem mentioned above!
> 
> I think "tabbing" is a kind of a high level concept, shouldn't be 
> implemented in ascii. Just like "bold", "italics", and "underline" 
> aren't implemented in ascii.