On 6/2/05, Drew Adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. _______________________________________________ Emacs-pretest-bug mailing list Emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug
