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Cp-Coder wrote: Welcome to the world of Edge!
...as opposed to the edge of the world.
Hopefully it doesn't make you want to jump off of it.
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Quote: as opposed to the edge of the world
You're a Flat Earther, right? 
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Yeah, and last year we had a convention - people flew in from all around the globe.
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Something right with the world today
And everybody knows it's wrong
But we can tell 'em no or we could let it go
But I'd would rather be a hanging on
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Taking off from the tabs vs spaces post few threads below, I was wondering why they were talking about tab = 8 spaces. Does it not make the code unreadable as it is too spaced out?
When tab is set to 8 spaces:
if (true)
{
if (true)
{
}
}
When tab is set to 4 spaces:
if (true)
{
if (true)
{
}
}
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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Yeah, but same as double spacing: it makes it look like you wrote more code!
if (true)
{
if (true)
{
}
}
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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So, if you get paid by lines, do you also get paid for empty lines?
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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Well, we get enough "articles" submitted with ten lines of code spread across two pages that it must be true! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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We get paid for article length? 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Glad I dont get paid per line of code
Years back, I worked with a product that had a limit of 32K lines of code
We used a framework that used up 21K of them
I spent so much time reducing the number of lines used so we could get all the functionality in
Id have ended up paying my employer
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The 8 space idea was around from the early days of Unix, and the only the terminals were basic teletypes (electric typewriters). I Have never understood why anyone thought that was a good idea on a device that generally could only print 80 characters across the page.
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Yes, it is waste of space, I feel. Or was it a mistake:
Australian Dev 1: Keep a tab on it, mate. I am going out for coffee.
Non-Australian Dev 1: tab on what? (didn't hear term mate)
Australian Dev 1: mate.
Non-Australian Dev 1: (again misheard) ah, keep tab on 8. Sure, but it is weird though.
And that caused this mishap.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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I'd think that it is older than Unix.
In Fortran, cols 1-5 were reserved for labels. Col 6 was for a line continuation marker. You could start your code in col 7, but then the continuation marker would be adjacent to the code, possibly disturbing the reading of the line (if, say, you use digits 1, 2, 3... to mark the order of continuation lines, and the code line starts with a numeric. So you set the tab stop at 8.
In the Fortran days, indenting loops was not very common; code was written from pos 8 - the left margin labels were good enough marking of loops. The problem of rightward migration of the source code was not relevant.
In those days, it was common to have arbitrary tab stops (like on most old mechanical typewriters). Often, a programming language recommended certain tab stops: If my memory is correct, Fortran (if you used tabs at all!) recommended stops at 8, 14, 20 and then for every 10. On a punched card, there was no way to tell if you had moved out to col 14 using the tab stop or the space bar - either left no hole!
When evenly spaced tab stops were getting common, there were some fighting about what comes after 8 - is it 15 (the first tab brought you 7 positions out from the margin, 8 + 7 = 15)? Or is it 16, (counting starts at 0, so n tabs brings you to position 8*n)? Or 17, the first one 8 cols out from the margin, i.e. at pos 9? If Fortran had still been strong, I guess the third alternative (9, 17, 25...) would have been rejected, but it is the most consistent and easiest to handle, so it won.
If there had never been any disagreemet about the positions/intervals, causing chaos in line/table layout when moving text files around, maybe tabs would have been popular today. More and more people are rejecting it, both because of the non-standardization and (among software developers) because they came to hate it through makefiles. In modern days the tab key has become common as a navigation key in GUIs, for moving to the next edit field, which further discourages its use as a text input key. Python is actively discouraging tabs.
I am happy about it. As an input method, it is fine, as long as it has the semantics of "Space fill up to the next tab position" (rather than inserting a tab character code into the file).
I hate it when some tab-loving co-worker edits "my" files, and garbles up some nicely lined up declarations, comments etc. Some garble not only the lines they edit, inserting tab characters, but their editors (don't ask me which one they are using) replace any run of 2+ spaces up to a tab stop, throughout the file(s). Today, most of our projects state explicitly that their source files shall contain no tab stops, so we are gradually able to control it. We did have a pre-commit plugin rejecting commit of files with tab stops, but then there were projects still using classical makefiles, so we had to slack up on that. Maybe we could have allowed tabs if we forced everybody to use the same identically configured editor/IDE, but if we tried to enforce that, I'm sure that several of our young energetic employees would have left the company.
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Quite possibly, although when I was writing Fortran & Cobol, all input was hand written to coding forms and sent to the Data Preparation department, where it would be punched onto Hollerith cards by a team of pretty young girls. And since neither language was free form the issue of tabs never arose as far as I know. Assembler was similarly fixed although by convention the operator field was set at column 11, operands at 21, and comments at 39.
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I suffered the same problems for my first year at the U. The first run was always to identify they typos that the ladies had made. We had a couple of punches available for making corrections, but there was a sign telling that after punching 8 cards, you had to yield to the next one in line.
During my 2nd year, we went from that huge Univac 1110 filling a big hall to three single-rack 16 bit minis, each handling 20 interactive terminals (and they did it well!). The great, expensive Univac had interactive terminals too, reserved for special (mostly post-graduate) projects, running at 300 bps. Although the mini could easily handle 9600 bps lines, we were ordered to reduce the speed to 1200 bps so that the proud Univac would not totally loose its face  We (that is, the TAs) had certain authorizations, so as soon as the professors went home for supper, and eager students would work through the night on the minis, we raised the line speed.
As you point out, assembler is another language (class) where unevenly spaced tab stops were/are common.
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Member 7989122 wrote: huge Univac 1110
I worked on a number of Univac systems from the 1108 to 2200/800 systems. Most of my time was spent poring over 500 page (printed) memory dumps trying to find bugs in the operating system. But at least it gave me job security. 
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Then you may know the one-operand infinite loop of 1108 - it didn't even take the whole of an instruction to create an infinite loop.
I don't remember all the details of Univac addressing formats, so this description may not be a 100% exact: You could set a bit in the address field for one extra level of indirection - in the location given, you won't find the data, but the address of the data. There you might find another address with the indirection bit set. Any levels of indirection was allowed, all executed as part of the operand value decoding. If you set up one such indirection pointing to itself, you had a single operand version of an unconditional jump to itself.
Only that while decoding that indirection, the CPU didn't respond to interrupts. A single-instruction loop could be broken, e.g. by the system operator. The single-operand loop totally locked up the entire CPU; it had to be rebooted - which, for a Univac 1100 system was something more than Ctrl-Alt-Del .
Most graduate, "responsible" students were aware of this quick way of taking the system down, but everyone tried to keep it secret to the younger, and potentially less responsible, student who might want to "try it out for fun".
The U had an old 1108 and a new 1110. I don't think the 1110 went down many times (if at all) from one-operand infinite loops. It could be that Univac had made it interruptible on the 1110, or it could be that my generation of students never did assembly programming on the Univac; we were on our way into the OO world (beliving that Simula would forever be The superhero of OO languages...). Very few of my fellow students ever saw the U1100 instruction set and addressing modes at all.
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Ha ha, forgot about that:
J *$ . Goodbye, World!
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Quote: a team of pretty young girls
You had pretty young girls?
Back when I was doing coding sheets they were a team of middle-aged angry women!
Try telling that to the kids of today!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Member 7989122 wrote: We did have a pre-commit plugin rejecting commit of files with tab stops, but then there were projects still using classical makefiles, so we had to slack up on that.
Find a plugin that can be configured to have exceptions for makefiles and anything else that's tool generated?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: Find a plugin that can be configured to have exceptions for makefiles and anything else that's tool generated?
We didn't have to find another tool, just to reconfigure the one we had. But the first decision, to deny tabs from anything that consisted of plain text, has to be revised.
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Did you guys all see the episode of Silicon Valley where the guy breaks up with a girl because she uses spaces to indent her code instead of tabs? Like what would anyone use spaces vs tabs?
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That at least explains why in FORTRAN names were limited to 6 chars (initally): not much room left when you have 8 chars per indentation level! 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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