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But that doesn't work if the indentation carries semantic meaning; you can't change the indentation without changing the meaning. Maybe you can correct syntactically-incorrect spacing (e.g. change 3 spaces to 4 spaces), but not much beyond that.

The Vim I use increases the indent of a code block when I ask it to. Just like it places a closing curly brace at the point where I tell it to. I don't see the fundamental difference between these two things.

But you have to ask it to, and by the right amount for every line/sub-block. If you accidentally get one line wrong, it could be a silent bug. In a language without significant indentation, as long as braces are preserved, once you are done moving code around a single autoformat will fix everything including nested blocks. And if you forget a brace, it's an error instead of a silent bug

no, they can't in indentation based languages. changing indentation implies changing the code. A formatter isn't allowed to do that

In gdb? It's a shame gdb picked python