Who are the "spacists"?

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2017 12:30 am, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Unicode was 25 years late to the game

I don't understand that comment. Are you suggesting that the oldest
convention wins? The Unix 8-column convention is older than Unicode, so it
wins?

Well... in that case, there are tab conventions that pre-date Unix, e.g.
those used by COBOL. The tabs command offers them as pre-defined standards.
>From the man page:

       -c     1,8,12,16,20,55
              COBOL, normal format.

But wait... before there was COBOL, there were *typewriters*. Its been many
years since I've had my hands on a manual typewriter, but if I remember
correctly the standard default tab setting was 1 inch.

So there you go. Unix was 50+ years late to the game.




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.