Re: The semicolon habit (was: Q: Definition of a scripting lang.)

scooter@mccabe.mccabe.com (Scott Stanchfield) writes:
>On the mainframe, tabs were a non-issue. On UNIX, I think they could cause
>tons of grief.


Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@cs.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
[Don't confuse 8 char Unix tab stops with indentation levels.]


I agree absolutely. But would like to say that the TAB in data is really
a misplaced compression algorithm. If you want to compress data use compress,
or gzip, or ARC. Never put TAB characters in data, and programs are data.


BTW psychological experiment show that the most readable tab value for
programs is 3. However other values 1..8 are not bad. That right a tab
size of one in a program is not bad. Zero is very bad. So if you are
worried about some deeply indented code not having space you can use
a tab size of 1 and still be quite readable.
--

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