Tabs -vs- Spaces: Tabs should have won.

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 22:53, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
<PointedEars at web.de> wrote:
>> It simply isn't an issue.
>
> Apparently it is *has not been* an issue for *you* *yet*.  There are
> languages (like Python) that are compiled just-in-time.  Besides, neither an
> IDE nor a compiler can (always) recognize that foo["b0r"] is not foo["bOr"]
> (which really is not a far-fetched example as the O and zero keys are
> adjacent to each other on in keyboard layouts).  You do not want such an
> ambiguity to bite you later.
>

I do agree that in a weakly-typed language such as python one might
conceivably try to use an undeclared variable and the IDE and compiler
won't catch that. However 0 vs. O would more likely be 0 vs. o as one
would really have to mess up bad to not only press the wrong key but
also hit shift at the same time. 0 and o are no harder to distinguish
in a VWF than in a FWF.

For that matter, why is it assumed that fixed-width fonts by nature
better distinguish 0 from O, or any other ambiguous characters? My
current system (Kubuntu 11.04, default VWF font in Firefox whatever it
may be) distinguished 0 from O just fine. Also I/1 and l/1 are easy to
distinguish, but I agree that I/l are not.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

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