I've read the flame wars over the use of spaces and tabs. When working with any markup language (when scope isn't very important and when pressing space 4 times is a PITA), I tend to minimize the tab width to just a space or two but I fluidly change to four full tabs for my other programming work.It is a matter of convenience most of the time and it only translates into real errors when sharing or mixing code.  So why they don't just declare a format for optional overrides such as #tab = 2 at the beginning of a file?  There would be no scoping issues and it could be handled with 2 lines of code.UpdateWhoa, I didn't explain myself very clearly: I only use editors that handle the tab/space conversion automatically.  The only cogent point I can understand in the criticisms I have read regarding Pythons use of white space is how borked the space/tab convention becomes when sharing code.Perhaps my confusion about using 4 spaces is because of my prior life in the publishing industry and our use of tabs not as a unit of white space but an abstract element used to describe a document's structure, not the display. Substituting it with 4 spaces has more to do with Unix's shitty 8-space convention than it does with elegance.  If Python standardized on using tabs by default we would eliminate the layer of abstraction (literal visual spaces -> abstract tab) that is getting lost when we leave IDE land and go to Usenet/chat/email land.  I thought that #tab=2 would be a nice way to ensure that any differences originating due to convenience formatting wouldn't muck things up elsewhere.
Why doesn't Python just establish a format for declaring tab widths?
python;code formatting