Tab Characters Proven Illogical

Tab Characters Proven Illogical

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Posted on Monday, September 18th 2023 by owlstuffing | 2 points
In simple terms a tab character is a shortcut that inserts N spaces. N varies by personal preference, by document, by editor. What looks nice with your 8 space tabs may look terrible with my 2 space tabs. Therefore, physically inserting the tab macro into a document that others read/edit is criminal. Q.E.D.

p.s. tab characters are not a substitute for formatting tools, don't be that guy

p.s.s. if humans were smart, they would store source files as the AST and not ASCII scratched onto clay tablets

6 comments

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@ Monday, September 18th 2023 by jjgreen | Open
For variety, I like a mixture of tabs and spaces.

@ Tuesday, September 19th 2023 by owlstuffing (OP) | Open
Agreed. I’m also lobbying for a three-character line separator standard.

@ Monday, September 18th 2023 by jauntywundrkind | Open
>What looks nice with your 8 space tabs may look terrible with my 2 space tabs.

Your 2 spaces don't maybe look bad to me, they certainly look illegible to me & awful.

Q.e.d, you are wrong & spaces are immoral.

The risk of things not being ideal is such an awful bludgeon against letting people do things their own way.

@ Monday, September 18th 2023 by marssaxman | Open
That's an oversimplification; tab characters have variable width, aligning the next character to a column which is N spaces wide.

@ Monday, September 18th 2023 by jdougan | Open
Look up elastic tabstops for s counterexample.

@ Monday, September 18th 2023 by kjs3 | Open
In simple terms a tab character is a shortcut that inserts N spaces.

So you don't even get the basic premise right. Jump right to the hyperbolic "criminal" (don't be that guy). And end with the "Q.E.D." (don't be that guy).

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