Comment by fc417fc802

I completely agree, hence my point about Lisps. In terms of the abstraction a tab communicates a layer of indentation, with blocks at different indentation levels being explicitly decoupled in terms of alignment.

Unfortunately the discussion tends to be somewhat complicated by the occasional (usually automated) code formatting convention that (imo mistakenly) attempts to change the level of indentation in scenarios where you might reasonably want to align an element with the preceding line. For example, IDEs for C like languages that will add an additional tab when splitting function arguments across multiple lines. Fortunately such cases are easily resolved but their mere existence lends itself to objections.