This is wrong, and misleading.
Monospaced fonts are usually designed with specific usage in mind. Come one, font designers don't live in a cave. They are usually briefed for how this font is intended to be used.
See, for example, a Consolas case study:
http://www.lucasfonts.com/case-studies/calibri-consolas/
>The first typeface Luc(as) was invited to work on was Consolas, a monospaced font (a face in which all glyphs have equal width).
>Intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is required, Consolas has proportions that are closer to normal text, and is therefore more reader-friendly than many other monospaced fonts. OpenType features include hanging figures or lining figures; slashed, dotted and normal zeroes; and alternative shapes for a number of lowercase letters, notably the most problematic character in any monospaced font, the ‘i’. The look of the text can be tuned to personal taste by varying the number of bars and waves in these letters.
>De Groot teamed up with a programmer to test the use of Consolas as a font for coding. “Having a programmer involved,” says Luc(as) with a smile, “I could preview hardcore use on the light-weight notebook chosen to represent his species’ preferred tool.” As the default monospaced font in Windows Vista as well as the Office Suite, Consolas became the de facto successor of the ubiquitous Courier.
(emphasis mine)