> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of John Jenkins
> Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 6:40 PM
> > The tab "character" is used in the file. Arguably, this
> "character"
> > should
> > never appear in a plain text file, rather it should be
> converted to an
> > appropriate number of U+0020 characters by the application on save.
> > Of course, this would make the file even bigger.
> >
>
> Tab-separated data files are quite common. (Indeed, I tend to get
> annoyed with the main UCD file because it's
> semicolon-separated.) I'm
> not sure why you'd want a tab never to appear in a plain-text file.
Different systems (and different applications, too) have different interpretations of where tab boundaries occur. The most common interpretations are modulo-8 and modulo-5, but I've seen modulo-4 as well. Viewing tabs on a system with a different interpretation of tab widths can be painful, which is why James proposed they not be used (also note his "arguably"). I code with modulo-3 tabs, and must convert to and from pure-space text to archive my code, which comes with its own set of problems.
/|/|ike
