On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
> That just leads to formatting problems because people don't understand
> that. If you must have tabs, they should be the same as the indention
> level, not some factor of the indention level. This doesn't have to be
> complicated. One tab == one indention level.
I'm not sure I understand how you reached that conclusion, but this is
what causes all the curent problems ( and the reason for people to
consider tabs as "evil" ).
Tab size is 8 - or at least used to be before the idea that you can
"configure" this. What's "evil" is the fact that some editors allow you to
change the size of the tab.
In a text you can have multiple indentation levels, and it's true that on
some typewriters you can use the TAB key to move to the next indentation
level ( the same as you use ^A to move to beginning of line in some
editors ). That doesn't mean the tab ascii code will have multiple sizes
( and change based on the position in the text). It just mean that stupid
programmers decided it's easier to add a panel that changes the number of
spaces equivalent with TAB instead of implementing code that uses spaces
for indentations < 8, and replaces 8 spaces with a tab symbol.
And because someone decides to "extend" a ( de-facto ) standard, later on
we have to abandon the standard and say it's "evil". That happens very
often, and we're so used with it that now it's almost a habit.
Costin
