19:23:37makomobeach: do you intentionally use tabs in your source code? i finally got around to fixing a few typos i found within sicl and was wondering whether i should "fix" the tabs as well
19:24:07makomo"fix" in the sense that they're being used for alignment. if you don't set your editor to display them as 8 spaces, everything looks off and weird
19:26:43pfdietztabs in source code are a holdover from the days of expensive limited disk space.
19:27:04makomoin my mind that's a bad thing precisely because of the variable display length of tabs. in a perfect world, we would use tabs for indentation and spaces for (further) alignment, but i doubt people will ever be careful about that
19:28:29makomoso just using spaces for everything is the only option that's left :-)
21:11:53jackdanieltabs have a fixed size due to other limitation imposed by the way things were limited in old days
21:12:12jackdanielthis is a cool writeup how things /may/ be: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
21:12:19jackdanielmakomo: how are your exams going?
22:31:53jcowanpfdietz: I would say they are a hangover from teletype/lineprinter days
22:32:17jcowanthough my ASR-33 did not understand them, which I think was a (mechanical) configuration problem.