Deprecate tabs for indenting (was Re: Indenting with tabs vs spaces)

[Ken Seehof]

I'm pretty sure everything that can be said about tabs has been said.  In
fact there's probably enough material for a book or two: "A Concise History
of Tab Usage", or "Professional Tabulation and Indentation Strategies for
Python Programmers", or maybe "Tab Usage for Complete Idiots".

I am promoting some new legislation that is currently being considered in
Congress.  The new law will require that all programming languages must
treat the tab character as a syntax error by June 2004.  Some details have
not yet been resolved, such as whether or not to permanently remove tab from
the new ASCII standard (this would have the side effect of decrementing the
ordinal values of all characters after 9).  It is estimated that this will
save the computer industry several billion dollars worth of programming time
every year.  Most of the savings are expected to be due to decreased
newsgroup volume on tab related topics.

For example, it is estimated that the total time spent by everyone on this
newsgroup reading this message is approximately 182 hours and 27 minutes
that could have been spent programming, or $21,894.00.  When you take into
consideration all programming languages that permit hard tabs, there are
thousands of useless messages just like this one every week!

Ken Seehof
kseehof at neuralintegrator.com
www.neuralintegrator.com