IMO, the idea to put tab characters into files is wrong from the beginning.
But of course it comes from the paper tape paradigma, where a file is
historically
a paper tape feeding a teletype machine.
With normal "local" typewriters, a tab is nothing other than a command
to the
typewriter to point the carriage to a certain position, and that's how
it should
be implemented in more record oriented environments.
That said, I would like it, if the editors I use replace all tabs to
blanks when
storing the files, and if there are never any tab characters inside the
files,
because, when reading them, you have the problem to decide what tab
positions
this file is meant to have, and you always have to guess, and it's wrong
most
of the time, and the result looks awful.
Regards tabs separating fields in external representations of database
records:
there are other possibilities. Commas and semicolons are not nice, but
it works,
given proper handling of the text fields (and: if the text fields really
contain text
and no binary data).
In total: I hate tabs and try to avoid them, wherever I can.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 12.01.2014 16:55, schrieb Paul Gilmartin:
On Sun, 12 Jan 2014 10:29:22 -0500, John Gilmore wrote:
... [Tabs'] effects depend upon local tab settings, and many
implementations disambiguate them by replacing them with blanks of
currently equivalent effect in saved/stored files.
Thereby sacrificing some small economy of storage. There are even
better arguments for deferring the disambiguation, such as:
o Use of tabs as field separators in exported data bases.
o Rendering in proportional-spaced fonts, particularly when the
choice of font ls left to the viewer.
-- gil
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