Larry Wall's comment on python...

[Courageous]

>Once upon a time, a large class of computers, and their attendant 
>peripherals, OSs and utility programs universally implemented tabs 
>hard-wired at 8 stops.

Indeed; such is this issue that I leave hard tabstops as 8 in my
editor, and set soft tab stops set to 4. What this means, in vim,
is that when tab is struck it "takes the cursor to the next logical
tab stop by inserting enough spaces to get it there." No real tab
exists. In fact, I have to strike ctrl-V[TAB] in order to get a
real one. I also use another setting that displays ascii-187 (»)
wherever a tab is. This is nice for editing those nasty makefiles
(that _REQUIRE_ tabs).

The relevant parts of my .vimrc can roughly be summarized as follows:

set tabstop=8
set softtabstop=4 
set shiftwidth=4 
set et
"ascii-187==»
set lcs=tab:»\ 

If you want to enter ascii-187 manually in vim (and can't cut out
of this message) type ctrl-V187

C//