> We generally (about 54-59% of our perl code) collapse each set of 8 > leading spaces into a tab.
Uh, no, please not. That's one thing I always "fix" when I see it (I never had the idea this might be intentional -- to me it was just some annoying behaviour of some editors, incuding vim). Either always use tabs or always use two spaces, but don't mix-and-match.
That'd be me ;) I prefer tabs for 8 leading spaces.
Any strong reason to use tabs? They made sense when disk space was scarce, source was distributed uncompressed, and all terminals and printers ran at low bit rates and agreed on tab stops. Now every editor seems to have a different idea of what a tab is, and no one uses output devices with really slow feeds. So what's left to justify indenting with actual tab characters?
