Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!sun!chiba!khb From: khb@chiba.Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - SPD Languages Marketing -- MTS) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: dpANS Fortran 8x Message-ID: <109818@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 13 Jun 89 19:35:21 GMT References: <2721@elxsi.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: khb@sun.UUCP (Keith Bierman - SPD Languages Marketing -- MTS) Distribution: usa Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 31 In article bill@ssd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) writes: >.... >I, personally, have never understood why any designer of a text editor or >other source-processing system should ever put a tab character in a source >.... No :>, so I guess you must be serious. Most modern systems have nifty things, like proportional fonts, multi-sized fonts etc., and then tab has the meaning of going to the place defined (i.e. tab stops). In a programming language (say vmsfortran, a language descended from, but not that similar to fortran :> :> :>) one might chose to define as a special symbol ... to "space over" line numbers, for example. Tab belongs on keyboards. It probably belongs in one of those extended character sets in f88. It probably has no use as a in a sensible language environment, but is perfect as the key to strike. gnuemacs tends to treat it (for .f files) as the autoindent command (though one has to get used to tabbing AFTER typing). There does seem to be little merit in having the symbol embeded in source code... yet another reason to not use vi. Keith H. Bierman |*My thoughts are my own. Only my work belongs to Sun* It's Not My Fault | Marketing Technical Specialist ! kbierman@sun.com I Voted for Bill & | Languages and Performance Tools. Opus (* strange as it may seem, I do more engineering now *)