Please... just stop this senseless defense of a Rube-Goldberg feature. There will NEVER be a universal agreement on whether tabs should be 2, 3, 4 or 8 spaces in width, and this causes endless tweaking of editor settings (a *humongous* waste of time) to handle source code made by other programmers with different settings.
And I, for the life of me, have never remembered getting any source code to display properly by fiddling with my text editor's (the very popular SciTE) tab settings. 4, 8, 3, 2, it doesn't matter. *Nothing* has ever made someone's tab-infested source code display completely cleanly. Nearly a third of my coding time seems to have been spent (read:wasted) trying to reformat some unenlightened tab user's source code to read comprehensibly. 1. Tabs as 8 spaces just take up too much horizontal area 2. But you can't use any other value because if you do, you will screw up display using cat/less/more !! DOES ANYONE NEED ANY REASON MORE COMPLICATED THAN THE ABOVE TO JUST *NOT* USE TABS??!???!??!!!?? Don't be evil - always configure your editor to convert tabs to true spaces. -- It's called DOM+XHR and it's *NOT* a detergent! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list