Tabs vs Spaces is so yesteryear... here's where it's at for real

I've been coding for many-and-a-bit years and throughout my career, I've been pulled in to the debate over tabs versus spaces so many times it's like hearing the same joke for the 42nd time... it's just not as fun now. It's still valuable, and it's still invariably an excitable debate, it's just not cool anymore.

Here's the thing...

First off, let's not have tabs and spaces, let's just invent a new thing. We can call it the codent, short for "coding-indent". We can save it away as an ASCII character or whatever, and let's even just be so bold as to invent a new number for it, let's say ASCII "32.9", or "9.32", both if we're saving Unicode okay. Oh, and if you don't understand my numbering system there, get off the thread, you shouldn't be forming opinions on tabs vs spaces :) ...stay with me here though because I want you to start using the codent because I'm becoming increasingly fond of the word since making it up a moment ago. The codent will work like this... it will save as a single character (shush Unicode), yet it will be displayed in the manner that suits your personal preferences. This is technically no different to the magical interpretation of some IDE's where you set how big a tab should be represented in spaces, and the point-of-save does some nifty conversion, and equally, the point of load. Thing is, that really depends on the IDE's capability, and some goofball out there is gonna be using some wacky number-of-spaces preference that screws with everybody else's.

The codent is consistent in use and fixes the storage over versatility and alignment stuff along the way. If the codent was a thing from the dawn of high-level languages then the countless hours wasted on this topic, arguments had, relationships ruined... and this post itself, would never have happened and we would all have some time back, and be happier with it... and think of the global economic and ecological impact of several decades of wasted storage because of this issue. It's actually possible as bad as cow farts for the environment. So go think about that.

Anyway, here's where it's really at... as the subject states, tabs vs spaces is so yesteryear... what I really care about is understanding ?! vs !? at the end of an excited puzzling written question. Which is it?! Huh!?


PS: If we can agree to make codent a real thing and bring it into common vernacular, my spellcheck stuff will be happy too - and so will yours, and seriously, who doesn't want a happy spellchecker?