On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 6:01 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info>: > >> On Mon, 20 Mar 2017 09:50 am, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >> >>> the 8-column interpretation is the only defensible use for >>> tabs. >> >> >> Oh, that's a law of physics is it? > > Pretty much. Try printing out your program with lpr, or sending it to > the terminal with cat, or opening it with with Firefox.
I don't use paper, but I tried cat and Firefox. In each case, the tab characters showed precisely as they should: as indentation. Was it the exact same amount of indentation that showed when I originally wrote the text in my editor? Was it displayed in the same font as my text editor uses? Was the window the same size as that of my text editor? Was the text colour the same everywhere? And do any of these questions even matter? Semantically, indentation is indentation. Obviously there are ridiculous extremes (a tab character probably shouldn't indent by just one pixel, nor should it normally indent by the entire width of a line), but even those should be under the control of the viewer, not the author. I prefer to use tabs in my code precisely *because* they are not defined in a concrete way. The only thing I demand of the display is that a sequence of N tabs be narrower than a sequence of N+1 tabs. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
