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Tab Characters Proven Illogical
In simple terms a tab character is a shortcut that inserts N spaces. N varies by personal preference, by document, by editor. What looks nice with your 8 space tabs may look terrible with my 2 space tabs. Therefore, physically inserting the tab macro into a document that others read/edit is criminal. Q.E.D.
p.s. tab characters are not a substitute for formatting tools, don't be that guy
p.s.s. if humans were smart, they would store source files as the AST and not ASCII scratched onto clay tablets
- jjgreen 3y agoFor variety, I like a mixture of tabs and spaces.
- owlstuffing 3y agoAgreed. I’m also lobbying for a three-character line separator standard.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago> What looks nice with your 8 space tabs may look terrible with my 2 space tabs. Your 2 spaces don't maybe look bad to me, they certainly look illegible to me & awful. Q.e.d, you are wrong & spaces are immoral. The risk of things not being ideal is such an awful bludgeon against letting people do things their own way.
- marssaxman 3y agoThat's an oversimplification; tab characters have variable width, aligning the next character to a column which is N spaces wide.
- jdougan 3y agoLook up elastic tabstops for s counterexample.
- kjs3 3y agoIn simple terms a tab character is a shortcut that inserts N spaces. So you don't even get the basic premise right. Jump right to the hyperbolic "criminal" (don't be that guy). And end with the "Q.E.D." (don't be that guy).