[Haskell] Gallopping Tab characters

[George Russell]

Andreas wrote:
 > The most flexible but safe solution is to simply define the indentation
 > as the sequence of indentation characters used. Two consecutive lines
 > are indented consistently whenever one indentation is a prefix of the
 > other. Hence you may freely mix different indentation characters, but
 > you must be consistent across lines. Any decent editor should be able to
 > ensure that.

Well no they won't, because some editors might replace blocks of 8 spaces
at the start of a line with TABs (or something like that), meaning that
8 and 7 spaces would go to "\t" and "       ", which your algorithm would
reject.  On the other hand, so would mine, so perhaps your algorithm is
better, being simpler


Simon Marlow wrote:
 > As for the width of the tab character: tab stops are every 8 columns.
 > Period.  The Haskell report says so

Yes, true.  I think it was Leslie Lamport who wrote in TeXHaX that anyone
defining an input format which includes tabs should be sentenced to ten years
programming COBOL in Nijny-Novgorod.  Off you go, Simon ... :)