Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!sics.se!ifi!enag From: enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: Are TABS bad? Message-ID: Date: 25 Mar 91 19:59:50 GMT References: Sender: enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) Distribution: comp Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 23 In-Reply-To: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu's message of 25 Mar 91 03:59:32 GMT Tabs are bad only when you think they are spaces, or vice versa. You have to _be_ the output device to get the tab expansion right, or you would have to shun (prohibit) all kinds of non-printing characters or character sequences from documents. That's definitely a lot worse than letting a tab remain a tab. For some applications, a tab character is a separator between elements that may contain spaces. For some output devices, control sequences can set tabs at any position on the line, some even individual tab stops for each line. You don't want to emulate that. All you know about a TAB is that it's horizontal (linear) white space. You don't know how many, nor whether it erases what it skips. Moral: Don't do anything with a TAB, it might mean something you cannot anticipate. -- [Erik Naggum] Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway