Re: Tabs

[Juri Linkov]

> From Wordnet, see definition 4.
>
> * Overview of noun tab
>
> The noun tab has 5 senses (no senses from tagged texts)
> 1. check, chit, tab -- (the bill in a restaurant; "he asked the waiter for 
> the check")
> 2. yellow journalism, tabloid, tab -- (sensationalist journalism)
> 3. tab key, tab -- (the key on a typewriter or a word processor that causes a 
> tabulation)
> 4. tab -- (a short strip of material attached to or projecting from
> something in order to facilitate opening or identifying or handling it;
> "pull the tab to open the can"; "files with a red tab will be stored
> separately"; "the collar has a tab with a button hole"; "the filing cards
> were organized by cards having indexed tabs")
> 5. pill, lozenge, tablet, tab -- (a dose of medicine in the form of a small 
> pellet)

Wordnet is the most complete indeed and contains definition 4
that describes this feature, as well as definition 3 of the tab key,
but it still lacks a third computer-related definition, namely the
same definition that exists in The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
(FOLDOC):

  TAB
     <character> (tab, Control-I, HT, ASCII 9) A character which
     when displayed or printed causes the following character to be
     placed at the next "tabstop" - the column whose number is a
     multiple of the current tab width.  Commonly (especially in
     Unix(?)) the tab width is eight, so, counting from the left
     margin (column zero), the tab stops are at columns 8, 16, 24,
     up to the width of the screen or page.
     A tab width of four or two is often preferred when indenting
     program source code to conserve indentation.
     Represented as "\t" in C, Unix, and derivatives.