The D Style and tab sizes

[Stewart Gordon]

Regan Heath wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 11:15:02 +0100, Steve Horne 
> <stephenwantshornenospam100 at aol.com> wrote:
<snip>
>> "Soft tab" usually means indent levels done in spaces. Any decent text
>> editors will insert spaces when you press the tab key these days.
>> "Hard tab" means the ASCII tab character, which is evil.
> 
> It's not evil, it's miss-understood. If you use it for it's original 
> purpose (IMO, to define your left hand margin) and nothing else, it 
> works perfectly in every text editor.
<snip>

I'm inclined to believe that "tab" originated as a contraction of 
"tabulate".  Good old-fashioned typewriters always gave you control over 
them, similar to that found in word processors - though I admit it took 
me a while to figure it out.  OK, so they may have only allowed you to 
set _left_ tabs, but that's an aside.  And therefore, they could be used 
to align text in rows and columns - though in modern word processors, 
the table facility does a far better job.

But in plain text, it's indeed better to use it only to indent.

Stewart.

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