Tabs versus Spaces in Source Code

[achates]

Harry George wrote:

> The reason is simple: People get confused, and accidentally get the
> wrong tab indents when they move among editors or among settings on
> the same editor.

People certainly do get confused. I'm always amazed that so many
people, even amongst those who manage to make a living out of writing
software, are unable to grasp the concept of a tab. But then a lot of
code is badly written, so maybe it figures.

A tab is not equivalent to a number of spaces. It is a character
signifying an indent, just like the newline character signifies the end
of a line. If your editor automatically converts tabs to spaces (i.e.
you are unable to create source files containing tabs) then either it's
broken or you have misconfigured it. Either way you probably shouldn't
be using it to write code.