Sometimes I remember a workplace system I used, where someone had set tabs to 8 space.

I don't know why it was 8, but it was.

PlunderBunny a day ago | parent | next [-]

The VAX/VMS terminals we used at university to learn Pascal defaulted to 8 space tabs, on a 80 column screen. That certainly pushed some people towards using spaces.

▲

1718627440 a day ago | parent [-]

I use 8-sized tabs with 72 columns in C. The human eye doesn't like moving all that much while reading and more windows fit one the screen even if it is annotated with git blame. In addition there is this argument from Torvalds, that you should mind your maximum nesting in a single function, which I also find useful.

	▲	Jensson 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> In addition there is this argument from Torvalds, that you should mind your maximum nesting in a single function, which I also find useful. Note that nesting is a much bigger issue in a language like C where you have to clean up after yourself, in most languages having a lot of nesting in a function isn't an issue.

▲

g-b-r a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's how they've been interpreted forever on Unix and other old systems

It's probably the main reason why they're so controversial.

	▲	kbelder 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Which was influenced by tab stops on typewriters... which were adjustable, but were generally set at 1/2", 3/4", or 1"... which was the equivalent to 5-12 characters, depending on your font (monospaced, but sometimes 10 cpi, sometimes 12 cpi).