Re: [Emacs-diffs] trunk r117000: Untabify cl-macs.el

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Daniel Colascione writes:

 > In Lisp code, using tabs makes no sense: code is frequently lined
 > up precisely, so you get a mixture of tabs and spaces anyway,
 > making it impossible to use a different tab-width. Why would you
 > want to use tabs at all?

It's an old (arguably bad) habit dating from the days where it saved
core memory and disk space.  I recall one Lisp for the 8080 whose
lexer removed all nonsyntactic space and compressed syntactic space to
a single SPC when transferring code from the disk read buffer to
program text space.

 > > (It's an uphill battle you'll lose anyway, because many people,
 > > yours truly included, have indent-tabs-mode set non-nil,
 > 
 > Don't do that then.

Emacs Lisp is not Python, more's the pity.  But I digress....  Nobody
is going to change their settings to nil without a pronouncement from
Stefan.  And even that may not work if RMS is non-nil....