Fatal flaw in D design which is holding back widespread adoption

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
> news:houh5g$29cs$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> But really, I don't see why the whole issue hasn't already been made 100% 
>>> personal style by a VCS that handles it the same way SVN handles EOLs. If 
>>> one person has problems involving another person using a different 
>>> indentation system, then at least one of them is doing something very 
>>> wrong. Seriously, how is it that this is 2010, we have things like syntax 
>>> highlighting as standard featutres in every editor that anyone ever 
>>> actually uses...and yet the whole world of programmers still can't 
>>> abstract away something as simple as f*cking tab sizes? Bah!
>>
>> It all started in the 80's when someone wrote a text editor that had 
>> customizable tab lengths (before then, tabs were 8. End of story.). Things 
>> went downhill from there. Since there's no way for an editor to figure out 
>> what the tab setting might be for any particular file, the only solution 
>> that works is to not use tabs. Thanks to some nameless programmer who 
>> ruined it for everyone <g>.
> 
> See, I think this is looking at things completely backwards: "...there's no 
> way for an editor to figure out what the tab setting might be for any 
> particular file...".

My strategy for saving time: stop reading a post as soon as I detect 
it's even remotely pro-tabs.

Andrei