8 Mar
2021
8 Mar
'21
2:52 a.m.
On 3/5/21 11:08 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 9:07 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com
<mailto:will.senn@gmail.com>> wrote:
Ha. I didn’t intend to reignite a flamewar.
I warned ya ... 🤔
 But, i’m still curious about entab/detab abd expand, etc. Were
they oor some of them created to help with this or what?
That's probably best for bwk, Ken, or Doug that go back to pre-UNIX
times at BTL. As was pointed out, bwk had them the SW tools book, so
the need/use go back pretty far.
As someone else pointed out, in the days of printing terminals like
the 10 cps horizontal tabs _sometimes_ printed faster if they were a
mechanical scheme built into the HW. On the other hand (and I don't
feel like finding/looking up at an ASR 33 manual), my memory is that
it did not have tabs stops and the UNIX TTY hander expanded them to
spaces so even that was not going to help. Also as someone else said,
in those days we had 132/133 column line printer listing - which again
printed >>much<< faster than the 10 cps terminal.  So the 8-space = 1
tab scheme certainly >>might<< make sense since it was enforced by the
HW.
Interesting. I continually forget the hardware that existed back in the
day. I vaguely remember using line printers, but then it was laser not
too long after that, so it's pretty fuzzy. My coding days came in the
dot matrix days, but again laser was not too long after that :). I
definitely heart 72 character lines - but prolly cuz of email more than
anything else except maybe the adage of, if it won't fit on screen (in a
terminal window), it's probably too complicated, which I still think is
reasonable.
After this thread, I think I'll probably stick to tabs because they seem
to work better across environments.
Will