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From: M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 11:44:49 -0500
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] tabs vs spaces - entab, detab
Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org
Sender: "TUHS" <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org>

> The reason to use tab was file size for one

This is urban legend. The percentage of 512-byte blocks that
tabs would save was never significant.

(I agree that tabs and--especially--newlines can significantly
compress fixed-field formats from  punched-card tradition, but
on the tiny Unix systems where tab conventions were
established, big tabular files were very rare.)

Tabs were a convenience for typists. Of course the tty driver
could have replaced them with spaces, but that would have
foreclosed important usage such as tab-separated fields and
run-time-adjustable tab stops tab-separated fields.

(I have run into latter-day trouble with selecting a space-substituted tab
from a screen, only to discover that I was copying or searching for spaces
instead of the tab.. That's not  an intrinsic problem, though. Editors like sam
handle it without fuss.)

Doug