but certainly a lot better than having a language force me to always use 8-space tabs just to make sure that lined up things stay lined up since the lineup is syntactically significant.

Not sure which language you are talking about, but I take Pythons or make's significant whitespace rules over the Perl significant whitespace rules (both of perl5 and perl6) any day, and twice on Wednesdays.

At least the rules in Python and make make sense, those of Perl don't.

Abigail