Fatal flaw in D design which is holding back widespread adoption

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:op.vaefb7p3eav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:56:32 -0400, Walter Bright 
> <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
>
>> BTW, type a file to a console window. Tabs come out as 8 characters, on 
>> Windows, Linux, and OSX.
>
> So do 8 spaces.  This is the surest way to make code easily 
> viewable/editable anywhere.  Just set the "expand tabs" option on your 
> favorite editor.
>
> My recommendation is to say indentations are 4 spaces and tabs should not 
> be used for indentation.
>

I've always found using spaces for indentation to make editing a real PITA. 
(Why woudn't I rather be able to move in/out one level of indentation with 
one arrow-key press instead of 4 (or so) ?)

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!