Exactly! A tab is literally "1 level of indentation". You can render that one level any way you like.
Unfortunately, though, everyone who has used tabs got bitten by stupid text editors that don't make it obvious whether you've used a tab or a space and substitute a tab for any run of 8 spaces. So if you're aligning an argument list you'll get a mixture of tabs and spaces. Everyone got bitten by this once back in the day then switched tabs off forever. They then switched tabs off in the text editors that the next generation are using.
I don't understand the appeal of pretty alignment of arguments with the last character of the function name in the row above. What's wrong with just using one more standard indentation level, like Black does in Python?
Black uses more lines. PEP-8 is generally more compact.
I'm more than happy to let something like Black handle formatting for me, though. Sure, there are some occasions where my own formatting would have been better, but the benefits far outweigh the (very small) costs here.
The silly thing is with tools like Black etc. it should be possible to use tabs again. If the only reason against tabs is people fuck it up, there's really no reason to use spaces in an auto-formatted project.
I suppose there must be some data in the serialized program which marks the start and end of a function body. But rather than having the semantics of that marker be:
> This is indentation whitespace, display it how you like
It should be
> This is a function body, display it how you like
Not only should readers be able to differ about how much whitespace is shown. They should be able to differ about whether it's whitespace that is used at all. Maybe they want something crazy like it makes a different kind if sound when you look at it, or appears in a different color or font. Whatever it is, it's no business of whoever is writing the program--they ought to be able to have an entirely different experience while still kicking out the same program.
