in reply to Tabs vs Spaces lets give this a go
The tab character is not a meta-character. It belongs in the group of 'control' characters, the first 32 codes as ASCII, whose historical mission was to control the the output device; as such, the meaning of each control character varies for each device -- for example, a printer will advance the head horizontally, but another device might do something different.
As for code, I agree with you philosophically; although, the is always the danger when code is passed around for the tab character to transform into either a single space, or into 8-spaces. Spaces are never candidates for transformation, but tabs travel with danger.
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