Larry Wall's comment on python...

[François Pinard]

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]
> [yka]
>> [Kow Kuroda]

>> > [...] For example, vi and emacs indent by 8 characters by default

>> [...] Well at vim :set ts=4 makes more fitting

> actually emacs defaults to 4 space indenting [...]

The Python mode writers for Emacs managed to automatically recognise the
indentation in use in a file, and continue editing that file with the same.
For new files, I get four spaces per level.

However, for Python files indented with TABs only, Emacs cannot successfully
guess if the author's intent was to expand those TAB with four or eight
spaces.  By default, I vaguely remember it picks eight.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard