[kijin]

> spaces are never used for indentation

If indentation should always use tabs (0x09) and never spaces (0x20), then the whole rant about indentation width is pointless. Any modern editor will allow you to adjust the displayed width of a tab. It's only when you use spaces for indentation that the width becomes a concern.

[repsilat]

There are two counterarguments to this:

- Line length. Some people say lines should be no longer than 78-80 characters, and you can't reasonably enforce a rule like this without answering how "wide" a tab is.

- Alignment. The "right thing to do" is to indent with tabs and align with spaces, but this is difficult for some people, against the religion of others (mixing tabs and spaces!) and insufficient if you want to align text that spans different levels of indentation. If most people use 8-character wide tabs, things will at least look right for them when it inevitably goes wrong.

[LnxPrgr3]

I've been playing with clang-format for my own projects (installed via homebrew, since Apple doesn't ship it with Xcode). I tell it to enforce limits assuming ts=8 and use tabs for indentation. My editor is configured for ts=4.

Doing that seems to actually mostly work! It's made some weird (and in one case obviously broken) formatting decisions, but otherwise I'm pleased with it.

[dllthomas]

I almost want a language that demands a visible character where indentation ends and alignment begins...

[mbell]

It's far easier to simply ban the tab character. All indentation problems magically go away.

[dllthomas]

It's easier, but that doesn't mean it's better.

[rossy]

When you have a limit of 80 characters per line, the indentation width still matters because code that doesn't appear to overflow with 4 space tabs could overflow with 8 space tabs.