Ha. I didn’t intend to reignite a flamewar.
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.