Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, James Stroud > wrote: > > >>Patently. Tabs should be reserved for tables, for which tabs were named. >>If they were meant to be used for indenting, they would have been >>named "indenters". > Or possibly "inds", in a similarly abbreviative spirit. > > Really? I thought they were for tabulators > <http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tabulator.html>.
Well, let's ignore the fact that this was probably a tongue-in-cheek reply. Firstly, the article you quote shows clearly that Hollerith invented the tabulator in the late 19th century. C L Scholes was granted the first typewriter paten in 1868, and Remington started manufacture in 1873. So tabs were already used (to produce tables) by the time the tabulator arrived on the scene. Secondly the tabulator was originally simply a device for counting the occurrences of the various values possible for a field (you may know it was invented to assist in the processing of the US census), and when printing was later added the output to the printer wasn't sequential anyway, so no "tab character" was required: the positions of report fields would be hard-programmed into the patch panel. ObPython: PEP 8 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/) was originally an essay by Guido in which he listed his own personal stylistic preferences. Naturally his opinions were taken seriously because he has proved to be a capable language designer, and when the PEP scheme was introduced his essay (originally published under the title "A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds") was adopted more or less unchanged. It has since been revised, but still refers to the original. Ultimately a conformance with PEP 8 can be taken as an indication that the author has reached a certain stylistic maturity. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list