"Ronald J. Legere" wrote:
> I dont know how I feel about the specific instances mentioned by
> george, but as a minimalist (or reductionalist, I dont know which) I
> like the idea of at least not adding too much stuff!
> But I do agree about this damn tab business. I have SOOOOO MANY TIMES
> been puzzled by wierd errors caused by my habit of trying
> to use tabs to intent.
In a famous diatribe on TeXhax, Leslie Lamport wrote (see
http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/digests/texhax/89/texhax.03.gz
)
> Francois-Michel Lang would like to get tabs to "work right" in a
> verbatim environment. One hopes that whoever is responsible for
> including "tab" in the ASCII character set is now roasting in hell for
> his efforts. It has been suggested that building a system that allows
> the insertion of tabs into a text file should be a capital offense.
> I'm not that extreme; I think that ten years of writing COBOL code in
> Novosibirsk would be adequate punishment. Unfortunately, there are
> still unpunished offenders building text editors. Fortunately, there
> exist programs that will replace tabs by the appropriate number of
> spaces. Running them on all your files will save you much grief
> in the long run.
I note that the Haskell standard permits the inclusion of
vertical as well as horizontal tabs, though the effect of
vertical tabs on the layout rules does not seem altogether clear.
I hope the standard's authors like COBOL . . .
If you are an Emacs user I recommend adding the line
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
to your .emacs file. This seems to solve my tab problems by converting
tabs I type at the beginning of lines into spaces. (Except when
I'm editing Makefiles, which is just as well since Makefiles depend
on tab characters.) There is also an "untabify" command which
removes tabs from a region.
I suspect most editors have such facilities. In fact I think
both of the two other text editors I have used a lot have.
