> Gimme a break.  Tabs in source code have been pretty much standardized at
8
> spaces for 30 years or so.  I can refer you to manufacturer documents
where
> tabs were encouraged to the point of "loosely interpretting" the fortran
> standards of the day so as to allow continuation/etc after the first tab
> stop rather than the normal N (slightly less than 8) spaces.  Of course,
in
> those days saving 6 bytes per line of code was a bigger deal than it is
now.
> Just because people are using inappropriate tools for VIEWING source code
> (WORD processors?  Web Browsers?  Feh!) doesn't make the authoring style
> incorrect...

So you are saying that it's wrong to set tab stops to other than every 8
columns!!?  The purpose of tabs is to quickly get to pre-defined columns of
your choice.  Dictating which columns these are in some supposed standard
diminishes the value of tabs.  Tabs are very useful, but different tab stops
make sense for different applications.

I have nothing against tabs as a user interface tool, in fact I use them
heavily myself.  However other people shouldn't be burdened with how I got
to a particular column.  There are lots of different preferences about where
tabs stops should go.  Mine vary depending on the type of file I am editing.
Every 8 columns was heavily used on Unix systems, but is certainly far from
a standard.  A few bytes of spaces versus one byte for a tab is no longer a
big deal.  There is no legitimate reason today for leaving tab characters in
your code (or other text files), and good reasons not to.


********************************************************************
Olin Lathrop, embedded systems consultant in Littleton Massachusetts
(978) 742-9014, olin@embedinc.com, http://www.embedinc.com

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