On Jan 7, 2008 3:56 AM, Ralph Shumaker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> SJS wrote:
> > begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 01:29:35PM -0800:
> >> Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> >>> Ralph Shumaker wrote:
> >>>> I never understood why spaces and tabs cannot be displayed with
> >>>> something visible.
> >>> Because a tab is not a printing character, it is a *control*
> >>> character, and its semantics are poorly defined.
> >>>
> >>> Tab is *not* just n spaces. It is "move the head/platen to tab stop"
> >>> and "tab stop" is defined by the end user.
> >> Be that as it may, that still doesn't address ASCII 032 not having the
> >> option of being visible so as to visually be able to differentiate it
> >> from a tab, on screen that is.
> >
> > I've used editors where tabs and spaces were visible.
> >
> > It got kind of annoying after awhile.
> >
> > Although, come to think of it, I didn't try using those editors for
> > looking at IAS code. Hm.
> >
> >> On the printouts, I would prefer things
> >> be as they are, except maybe being able to tell the printer to use the
> >> computer's definition of the tab. I think someone mentioned that the
> >> printer *always* uses 8.
> >
> > That was probably me. And it's a default -- some of the old dot-matrix
> > printers, at least, had the ability to "set tabstops", IIRC.
>
> I *thought* I remembered my printer having that feature in the
> documentation (tho I never used it), my Star NX-1000 (IIRC), my first
> color printer for my Amiga 500.
< lots of font-related stuff snipped >
Just to refresh someone's memory, the computer output interpretation
of a tab stop has been "Advance to the next multiple-of-8 column".
With a possible off-by-one depending on how you enumerate the columns.
I think I have been aware of this for 45 years. Maybe only 44.
Of course this is only valid for constant-width fonts.
carl
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carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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