ANN: Dao Language v.0.9.6-beta is release!

[Scott David Daniels]

Tom Anderson wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, paulo.jpinto at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> Dave Hansen wrote:
>>
>>> TAB characters are evil.  They should be banned from Python source 
>>> code. The interpreter should stop translation of code and throw an 
>>> exception when one is encountered.  Seriously.  At least, I'm serious 
>>> when I say that.  I've never seen TAB characters solve more problems 
>>> than they cause in any application.

> So, could someone explain what's so evil about tabs?

They appear in different positions on different terminals (older hard-
copy), do different things on different OS's, and in general do not
behave nicely.  On many (but not all) systems, they advance to the next
column that is a multiple of 8, but not all, and people (and editors)
use them freely to get to those positions, not understanding that they
are not necessarily going to the same position.  The fact that they
provide an ambiguous display is enough to make them evil.

--Scott David Daniels
scott.daniels at acm.org