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> Anyway then you would get stuck policing exactly how long a "line" is, do comments count, etc...

A line is 80 characters. Indent is 8 spaces. Comments do not count.

Case in point, I prefer an indent of 4 spaces.

It does not matter. However hard you "prefer" the value of pi to be 3, it will stay an irrational number. Eight-space tabs are a constant of the universe.

not in this universe they aren't - many popular applications indent 4 spaces by default when pressing the Tab key, and render physical tabs as four spaces, for example github ;) tabs of 8 space width are a legacy travesty that wastes space :)

Ours is indeed a decadent universe that is slowly being corrupted by powerful forces of evil (such as the 4-space tab brain damage of github). But there are still beacons of light to guide us:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/_sources/process/codi...

https://wiki.musl-libc.org/coding-style.html

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=style&sektion=9

https://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man9...

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