Tabs versus Spaces in Source Code

[Terry Hancock]

Edmond Dantes wrote:

>The real issue is, of course, that ASCII is showing its age and we should
>probably supplant it with something better. But I know that will never fly,
>given the torrents of code, configuration files, and everything else in
>ASCII. Even Unicode couldn't put a dent in it, despite the obvious growing
>global development efforts. Not sure how many compilers would be able to
>handle Unicode source anyway. I suspect the large majority of them would
>would choke big time.
>  
>
I think that was the old conventional wisdom, but it's not so obvious
anymore. UTF-8 is a pretty cool standard.  gVim handles it just
fine, Python source allows UTF-8 within string literals, even if it
doesn't like it in identifiers, and IIRC, Unicode is the official standard
for Java files.  It continues not to be used so much, but a lot of the
capacity is there.

Also, the 'config files in ASCII' thing is simply not a problem -- ASCII
*is* a full-subset of UTF-8, so an ASCII config file is already a UTF-8
config file.

Personally, I don't think ASCII is nearly as entrenched as you suggest.
I wouldn't be surprised if Unicode/UTF-8 has fully supplanted it inside
of 10 years.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com