[Bf-committers] Text editor: "tab as space" as default? do we really need to push PEP8 that way?

[Paolo Ciccone]

One more voice in favor of tabs as spaces. TextMate, the editor that I use,
and Emacs, can handle that situation very well.
But what's more important, tabs have been proven in several occasions to
lead to inconsistent presentation of the code.
They are a "relative" entity, while a given amount of spaces will always
appear as originally intended. When code uses a
mix of tabs and spaces, and that happens often when inserting hard tabs, the
resulting indentation goes often haywire.
When I hit Tab I expect the editor to indent and align my code in a
consistent manner, based on the language used.
In Emacs pressing tab in the middle of the line, not just at the beginning,
performs that operation. So, there is clearly
a separation between what the key does and its ASCII representation.

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Paolo Ciccone