[Haskell] Re: Use of tab characters in indentation-sensitive code

[Jeff Dalton]

> This just shows how deeply ingrained the ascii plain text mindset is
> in the programming community.  I don't expect anything like this to ever
> fly, for this reason.  You guys won't let it.  :(

(Sorry, but how did ascii get in there?  Was the argument for
Unicode or HTML?)

As for mindset, the programming community was one of the first
to try "structure editors" and other tools that gave a more
abstract view of source code.

The programming community has also been pretty quick to start
using HTML and XML.

That plain-text syntaxes for source code have survived suggests that
there are good reasons for that and that the answer to the question in
an earlier message

  Don't we have similar needs as other electronic document
  manipulators?

is "no, not similar enough".

I work with HTML and XML all the time, and I have never felt any
desire to represent programs that way; and when I do have to deal with
an XML syntax for anything like a program (such as ant acripts, xslt
stylesheets), I find it very unpleasant.

-- Jeff