If only
On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 3:10 PM, <f...@thefsb.org> wrote: > The subcommittee of ISO Joint Technical Committee 1 that is responsible > for coded character sets has deprecated the Horizontal Tab control > character in an approved revision of ISO/IEC 646 to be published in the > next few months. > > "The days of HT's usefulness in printer control are long gone," said Dr. > Yishoki Makimi, chair of the subcommittee. "Today tabs are only used in > software source code. Our research revealed they serve no function in > software engineering other than to provoke arguments and therefore waste > time. We measured that HTs accumulated economic cost surpassed that of big > vs. little-endian byte order in 2007 and started the committee work to > deprecate it shortly after that." > > The width of a horizontal tab was originally adjustable in printer > mechanism and was never standardized. Its subsequent use for indentation of > instructions in the source code of block-oriented languages was economical > when computer storage was expensive. Eventually many programmers adopted > spaces leading to the contraversy that motivated the subcommittee. > > Microsoft has responded to ISO's move by announcing that HT will contunue > be supported in Windows through Version 8, after which the code point will > be repurposed for the Windows Key. Hillary Jeremy, Microsoft's code quality > and standards boss, welcomed the move saying, "We've probably spent more > time, over the years, fighting over tabs than we have spent fixing bugs in > Office." > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list >
-- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
