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> Here's my simple plea: stop it. Stop mentioning vertical tabs in tutorials and language references. I'm failing to see why this is an issue? The examples tut
by jkire 11y ago
> Here's my simple plea: stop it. Stop mentioning vertical tabs in tutorials and language references.
I'm failing to see why this is an issue? The examples tutorials/references he gave only mention '\v' in tables of possible escapes. What is the downside to mentioning it, people spending 5 minutes googling for what a vertical tab is?
Unless a language removes support for escaped string literals entirely it seems odd to remove support for a particular standard, if mostly unused, escape sequence.
- zaphar 11y agoWhen I was a very green coder I saw the vertical tab in one of those tables and spent a fruitless afternoon trying to use it to align some text. I don't even remember what I thought it did but the afternoon could have been better spent if anything anywhere had said it does absolutely nothing on any modern system. So the harm is that people see vertical tab and without the associated historical context come up with their own ideas of what it does and then waste time. If you do include it at least show it in such a way that people know it's a historical oddity with really nothing but very obscure uses like the fingerprinting example mentioned elsewhere in the comments.