Python syntax

Looks at keyboard of Creed 444 Teleprinter just behind me, no TAB key...

ITA No.2 doesn't have a code for TAB.

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Cheers 
Dave.

That's 'cos it's Baudot not ASCII and only has a 32 character alphabet.

Creed 444 were rubbish, but a hell of a lot better than a Creed 7b. Teletype 28 was much nicer and a Siemens T100S was the tops.

Baudot tape was 5 track and the Baudot character set was 5 bits - 30 characters + two 'shift' symbols to switch between Letter and Number shifts.

The KSR33s we used (same as an ASR33 but lacking the paper tape reader and punch) were ASCII devices. The KSR33 uses 8 track paper tape. Still a bit of a dog's breakfast because the 1900 used 6 bit ISO characters which required three 'shift' symbols, alpha, bets and delta. Alpha was the normal upper case shift and all that was needed for programming in upper case. Beta shift was lower case and I never needed to use the delta shift. You had to use both alpha and beta shifts to represent the full set of ASCII characters, so the uniplexors and scanners (peripherals you used to connect teletypes and other serial devices to a 1900 had to do bidirectional ASCIIISO character code conversion.

The 6-bit ISO code suited the 1900's 24 bit word length because it stored

4 characters in each word and had instructions that let you read and write individual characters without any of the shifting and masking malarkey that more modern processors require. The assembler had an extended address notation to support character access.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

Modern processors? Modern processors are usually byte-addressable and require no special handling to extract and insert byte-sized characters into memory words. Incrementing addresses by one moves pointers up by one byte, or one character when an 8-bit character set is used.

So no special instructions are needed and no tricks required to walk through a character string (first through the characters stored in a single word and then on to the next word).

I said "when an 8-bit character set is used". Of course I know that this is less common today than 20 years ago.

However I remember programming a machine with word addressing and how inconvenient that was when handling character strings. Would be less of a problem today, just use a word for each character. But in those days that would have wasted too much memory.

No! Every typewriter I ever used had adjustable tab stops.

Tabs should *never* be assumed to be a fixed number of spaces.

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:>WIN                                      | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

Indeed - "tab" is short for "tabulator", tables don't only have columns of 8 characters. It is a typists' convention to indent the start of a paragraph by 8 spaces (just as a comma is followed by a single space and a full stop by two), nothing more than that.

I think we've done this to death now.

Just set your editor to output tabs as spaces, with the number of spaces set to your personal indenting preference.

---druck

This is another example of the stoopidity of route-learning. Programming should be done by filling the RELEVANT parameters into a template. So should be: . Screw the syntax! It's only the ideas that matter.

Real men use Ada?

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Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greed. Me.

Hmm, yes. But also mainly - so not just manly ... ;-)