> In both courses in the 1990's ... Is this a case of academia being out of touch

The problems of the tab character "\t" were not as apparent in the 1990s like they were later.

Different contexts have different indentation settings, while most people agree on 4 columns nowadays, do most apps default to 8 columns, which used to be standard.

The chaos starts if people mix tab with space and everything looks perfectly indented in their own editor, but once it's opened with another editor ... or posted to perlmonks, it becomes a mess (yes browsers default to 8).

I actually use the tab-key for indentation, but my editor has a setting to insert space. And a command to "untabify" foreign code.

One benefit of "\t" is that it can be easily reverted with one backspace instead of four. But again, this can be fixed with modern editors and I use automatic indentation anyway.

And I wasn't talking about semantic effects.

Perl code is thankfully resilient against "\t" vs " " confusion, and whitespace rarely matters.

But ask the Pythonistas what they think was Guido's biggest design error...

In short: Academics in the 2020 wouldn't say this anymore.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^4: [RFC] Review of module code and POD (tab) by LanX
in thread [RFC] Review of module code and POD by Bod

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