ISO deprecates ASCII Horizontal Tab control character

[David Robinow]

If only


On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 3:10 PM, <fsb at thefsb.org> wrote:

> The subcommittee of ISO Joint Technical Committee 1 that is responsible
> for coded character sets has deprecated the Horizontal Tab control
> character in an approved revision of ISO/IEC 646 to be published in the
> next few months.
>
> "The days of HT's usefulness in printer control are long gone," said Dr.
> Yishoki Makimi, chair of the subcommittee. "Today tabs are only used in
> software source code. Our research revealed they serve no function in
> software engineering other than to provoke arguments and therefore waste
> time. We measured that HTs accumulated economic cost surpassed that of big
> vs. little-endian byte order in 2007 and started the committee work to
> deprecate it shortly after that."
>
> The width of a horizontal tab was originally adjustable in printer
> mechanism and was never standardized. Its subsequent use for indentation of
> instructions in the source code of block-oriented languages was economical
> when computer storage was expensive. Eventually many programmers adopted
> spaces leading to the contraversy that motivated the subcommittee.
>
> Microsoft has responded to ISO's move by announcing that HT will contunue
> be supported in Windows through Version 8, after which the code point will
> be repurposed for the Windows Key. Hillary Jeremy, Microsoft's code quality
> and standards boss, welcomed the move saying, "We've probably spent more
> time, over the years, fighting over tabs than we have spent fixing bugs in
> Office."
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
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