> I want to arrest any misconception that us Tabbers would do anything as nonsensical as using our precious variable-width tab-stop chars for anything like column-aligning identifiers: we don't.
The irony is that this is exactly what tab characters are used for. Have you wondered why they're called tabs? Because they're used for tabulation, making tables. They are intended for aligning columns in a table. Not for indentation.
We were talking about typewriters, which don't have a file format at all. Nevertheless, it might not be stored as ASCII code 9 in Word anymore (though it originally did), but it is entered and behaves like a tab stop on a typewriter, and is called a tab character: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/documentformat....
The irony is that this is exactly what tab characters are used for. Have you wondered why they're called tabs? Because they're used for tabulation, making tables. They are intended for aligning columns in a table. Not for indentation.