🚀 go-pugleaf

davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis") writes:

>  It seems to me that a tab character in a text file is a bad thing since
>there is some ambiguity over what it means.

Hear hear!  I hate tabs.  I wish they had never been invented.  The
operating system we use does not support tabs.  Every so often I get a
mail message which looks a real mess - I now know to try writing it to a
file and detabbing it, because it probably contains tab characters.

We are starting to move to the Unix operating system.  It seems to me
that tabs are used all over the place in Unix as a primitive file
structuring mechanism.  The tabs are usually invisible by default when
files are displayed, and they add complication to all programs which are
written to process text files.  Two files which look the same may be
structurally different - one may have <TAB><TAB> between two fields,
while the other may just have a lot of spaces which is usually taken
to be equivalent to a single tab.  There is ambiguity about whether tabs
are structuring elements or space saving devices.  File compression is a
far better method of space saving anyway.

    Kevin Donnelly