Thanks all for your suggestions. I am going to go with "<tab>". Yes, whatever you use, other than a rigorous escape regimen (\\ = \, \t = tab) introduces ambiguities: <tab> could also represent a literal ' < t a b > '. But this is not a diagnostic dump, this is a confirmation back to the user of what he or she specified, and the user should know whether he or she asked for a tab or a silly character string.
Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2014 10:19 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Mainframe "culture" question - how display a tab character? On 2014-01-12, at 07:06, John Gilmore wrote: > ... [HLASM advocacy redacted.] > I also prefer to use 'µ', 'µµ', 'µµµ', or 'µµ...µ', one or more > instances of the Greek minuscule, to display the positions of such > characters. It is widely available (for use in such constructs as > µsec) but even less used than '¬' or '»'. (Doing so of course brings > in train a local requirement to write, say, 'microsec' instead of > 'µsec'; but I have not found this onerous.) > It's Whac-a-Mole; you can't win. Whatever character you use to represent TAB (e.g. "⇥") becomes itself inaccessible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
