That is a really lousy way to do it. Even if you only need 3 fields, having them shift alignment would look really bad.
Well, I think it started by the fact that the Windows API automatically turns tabs into Alignment codes when the message is sent to update the status bar GUI control. For cross-compatibility, I believe Skid added a work around for Cocoa but I don't think the tabbing works on FLTK (where adding a tab substring actually performs a tab stop).