Deprecate tabs for indenting (was Re: Indenting with tabs vs spaces)

[Peter Hansen]

Ken Seehof wrote:
> 
> I am promoting some new legislation that is currently being considered in
> Congress.  The new law will require that all programming languages must
> treat the tab character as a syntax error by June 2004.  Some details have
> not yet been resolved, such as whether or not to permanently remove tab from
> the new ASCII standard (this would have the side effect of decrementing the
> ordinal values of all characters after 9).  It is estimated that this will
> save the computer industry several billion dollars worth of programming time
> every year.  Most of the savings are expected to be due to decreased
> newsgroup volume on tab related topics.

My god!  Haven't you considered the environmental impact of having
to dispose of all those tabs?!  Where will we put them all?
It's irresponsible ideas like this proposed by narrow-minded
technologists that are the cause of so many of the world's ills
today.  For shame.

(My suggestion would be that we send them into SPACE... )