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Re: Use no tabs in Info


From: Miles Bader
Subject: Re: Use no tabs in Info
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 07:19:35 +0900

On 6/2/05, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:
>     TAB characters are a pretty standard part of Emacs culture; a
>     restriction on their use would require enforcement to be effective.  A
>     program that doesn't deal with tabs is likely to experience them
>     anyway.
> 
> The same argument could be made for *Help*, or Dired, or *Apropos*, or
> *Buffer List*, or.... Those buffers don't use TABs, but there is no
> "restriction on their use" or any explicit "enforcement" to not use TABs,

Those are automatically generated buffers; the code which generates
them was written once, and the author happened not to use tab
characters when doing so.  This says _nothing_ about the difficulty of
enforcing a restriction on the authors of new texinfo files, or of
otherwise influencing them to do so.

> People tend to perpetuate what they see there already (e.g. Info menus with
> TABs or without them). The suggestion is just to untabify Info, not to
> implement any ongoing "enforcement" of a no-TABs policy. The current
> situation is a mixture anyway (spaces and TABs, at random), so even if a few
> TABs happen to creep in after purging them once, there is still an overall
> improvement (consistency, fixed-width chars).

This seems a pretty ineffective way to cause people to stop using
tabs; if you only use this method,  your program _is_ going to
encounter tabs into the indefinite future.  It would be a lot cleaner
to just deal with them.

[I know the annoyance -- I often use AWK for string processing, which
makes scanning through strings much more clumsy than just counting
their length (unlike C for instance).  But  tabs are a standard
character, and people will use them (often without even realizing it);
you can't just wish them away.]

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.




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