Question for removing trailing whitespaces (not vertical tab) from source

[Eric Weddington]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Korn [mailto:dave.korn@artimi.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 9:59 AM
> To: 'Daniel Jacobowitz'
> Cc: 'Andrew Haley'; 'Kai Tietz'; gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: RE: Question for removing trailing whitespaces (not 
> vertical tab) from source
> 
> On 13 March 2007 15:12, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> 
> > Personally I think that regardless of your indentation preferences,
> > using anything besides eight column tab stops for \t is 
> silly; that's
> > what "cat" is going to use.
> 
>   Well, I always *used* to think of a tab stop as being 
> unequivocally and
> universally equal to 8 columns too, but that was a long time 
> ago and since
> then bitmapped displays and WYSIWYG editors have come into being ... 

At the risk of extending this out further, can someone explain to me why 
using TABs is preferrable, as they are interpreted, while spaces are
unambiguous?

Not everyone uses emacs, vi, <your favourite editor>, or even GNU/Linux...

Eric