On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 6:31 AM, Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
On May 1, 2013, at 9:09 PM, Tobias Conradi <mail.2012@tobiasconradi.com> wrote:
What is the benefit of having more than one tab or one space as one separator?
It lets people use whatever text editor they want, regardless of what it does with horizontal white space.
It lets the columns line up naturally for human reading.
It lets existing files (which have more than one tab in a row, at least for leading spaces) be read without having to reformat them.
If instead of space and tab the source files would only use tab, then columns still can be lined up for human reading and no compatibility inside the IANA time zone database would be broken? Sadly the thread starter David Muir Sharnoff <lists@dave.sharnoff.org> didn't yet reply to http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-May/019162.html, so one would have a visualization of data containing spaces as separators. -- Tobias Conradi Rheinsberger Str. 18 10115 Berlin Germany http://tobiasconradi.com