this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Tabs are designed for tabulation (hence the name), not indentation. The side effect is that a tab's length changes based on its position in a line, which is terrible for programming. If you use tabs in the Python REPL, it looks like this:
What does this even mean? A tab is a tab.
Tab's don't have multiple lengths inside a file, they all have the same length.
That's the point of tabs.
The horizontal tabulation character moves the cursor to the next column which is a multiple of the tabulation length. See the examples here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key
At least for me, it renders like this:
Clearly the whitespace produced by each tab character has a different length.
Yes
No, each tab has the same size, the text rendered over the top of the tabs are not the same size.
Always remember the golden rule: Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.
How long is a newline?
A newline is the separator between lines, so the concept of length doesn't make sense for it.
Correct.
And a tab is the separator between stops.
Indeed. It's a separator, so using it for indentation doesn't make sense.
Stops are indentation.
They're what you indent... to.
Tab goes to the next stop, the same way newline goes to the next line. Exactly the same way. If you write more text before the next line, the amount of whitespace shrinks. That doesn't mean the "length" of a newline changes. It always goes one line.
A tab always goes one stop.