On the D Blog: Language Plasticity is More Important Than Ever

[monkyyy]

On Monday, 10 August 2026 at 12:57:42 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> In this blog post, Adam Wilson goes into the importance of 
> language plasticity in the LLM era, particularly as it applies 
> to the number of tokens used on a given task, and why D has an 
> advantage.
>
> https://blog.dlang.org/2026/08/10/language-plasticity-is-more-important-than-ever/

> The tabs-versus-spaces debate has long divided developers. In 
> the LLM era, it carries real financial weight. Many tokenizers 
> treat whitespace as distinct tokens, and common conventions 
> amplify the difference.

> In practice, this means every level of nesting can add multiple 
> individual space tokens
> This flexibility lets teams choose tabs (a single character) 
> without breaking semantics.

from your own first source; the first image 
https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13666v1/x1.png

No; those grouped yellow-highlighted spaces is suggesting they 
are encoding them together

If that where the numbers come from, they are suggesting deleting 
whitespace; grouping 4-spaces as 1 token is a "gpt-2" level 
technology.