On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 11:59 AM, John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote:

> If we were going to reformat all the sources, I'd rather we observe the
> rule
> "never use tabs". I don't see what benefit they possibly offer.
>

Make files aside, is there any other justification for hard tabs besides
compression?

​
40
​+​
years ago when
​my​
 only available language
​s were DEC​
assembler
​s​
a line
typically looked like:

    <ht> OPCODE <ht> OPERAND [ ',' OPERAND ]* <ht>+ ';' COMMENT

With identifiers limited to 6 characters and short comments tabs easily
produced
50% compression.  In more modern languages I have to believe that the
compression
is _much_ less.