RE: [Haskell] Gallopping Tab characters
Simon Marlow wrote:
As for the width of the tab character: tab stops are every 8 columns. Period. The Haskell report says so
Yes, true. I think it was Leslie Lamport who wrote in TeXHaX that anyone defining an input format which includes tabs should be sentenced to ten years programming COBOL in Nijny-Novgorod. Off you go, Simon ... :)
/me grabs COBOL book and bottle of Vodka sniff Simon
Simon Marlow wrote:
/me grabs COBOL book and bottle of Vodka
Actually it wasn't Nijny-Novgorod it was Novosibirsk. The exact Leslie Lamport quotation is here: http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/digests/texhax/89/texhax.03.gz or:
Francois-Michel Lang would like to get tabs to "work right" in a verbatim environment. One hopes that whoever is responsible for including "tab" in the ASCII character set is now roasting in hell for his efforts. It has been suggested that building a system that allows the insertion of tabs into a text file should be a capital offense. I'm not that extreme; I think that ten years of writing COBOL code in Novosibirsk would be adequate punishment. Unfortunately, there are still unpunished offenders building text editors. Fortunately, there exist programs that will replace tabs by the appropriate number of spaces. Running them on all your files will save you much grief in the long run.
participants (2)
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George Russell -
Simon Marlow